Background

As Australia’s first public hospital dedicated to cancer treatment, research, and education, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre has a high demand for CT scans every day of the year. The hospital’s teams knew that the way they were delivering the process needed to change to improve the patient outcomes. Typically, it took on average 29 days from booking a CT scan, to attending it, and the results took a further 60 hours.

The overall impact was that patients were waiting over a month to get urgent results, and Peter Mac staff were frustrated with the avoidable back and forths and delays the process created for each patient. The leadership team used XeP3 to build a detailed understanding of how the process was working, the amount of Noise it had, and what the quantified underling drivers of that Noise were.

The team launched a change program to address the underlying causes of the Noise, simplify the process, and bring the total elapsed time each patient.

XeP3 insights

• 44% of total effort across all the roles involved was Noise – 2 days every week
• Underlying drivers of the Noise were insufficient booking slots available, managing delays with internal communication and interruptions to specialists whilst performing scans
• The process problems created Noise for critical roles including Radiologists, Radiographers, and Outpatient Doctors
• Too many roles were involved in resolving any problems that occurred, slowing service down

Outcomes

• The average number of days to book a CT scan reduced from 29 days to same day booking​
• Increased scheduling performance led to material revenue uplift
• The freed-up capacity increased scan throughput by 6 each day
• Report turnaround time fell from 60 hours to 13 hours