
GI Volume Continues to Grow – Keeping Up Can Be Difficult
Did you know that gastroenterologists perform approximately 15 million colonoscopies a year? Colonoscopies account for up to 24% of ASC volume each year.1
In a previous blog post, Navigating Rising Demand: GI’s Response to Rising Colon Cancer Screening & Reprocessing Volume, we learned that with the recommended age for colon screening going from 50 down to 45, there was a predicted colonoscopy volume increase of up to 56%. For GI reprocessing professionals, this number is no small consideration.
This is just one factor increasing GI case volumes, resulting in reprocessing challenges that can impact quality and throughput. Nurses, technicians, scheduling teams, doctors and more will all feel the strain of this increasing case volume, and the negative impacts when reprocessing outcomes struggle to keep up.
So, what aspects of our technician’s workdays can experience the impact of increasing volume?
Compliance & Cleaning Efficacy
67% of 2024 GI Landscape report participants indicated that their department’s focus that year needed to be rooted in patient safety, including factors like IFU compliance, training & education, cleaning verification, and manual cleaning processes.
Furthermore, Ofstead & Associated recently released the 2024 Q4 data on adverse events reported to the FDA related to flexible endoscopes, demonstrating a 14% increase in 2024 compared to 2023. The continued uptick of reported events has been attributed to improved transparency and heightened awareness around flexible endoscope reprocessing. Many of the events were attributed to poor cleaning outcomes and insufficient visual inspection; factors that can be impacted by increased volume if adequate resources, such as staff and time, aren’t available.
Visual inspection can also be the source of bottlenecking as volume increases. One or two borescopes may have been sufficient before, but an increase in volume might mean another borescope is required, or that an additional technician or nurse is needed to provide dedicated visual inspection. Without appropriate visual inspection and cleaning verification tools, cleaning inadequacies can slip through the cracks and go undetected until it negatively impacts outcomes. If a department is currently seeing negative outcomes, they will only increase as volume does.
Organization
Organization takes time, diligence and consistency to maintain, and as volume increases in departments already pressed for time, maintaining organization can start to feel untenable.
Disorganization can lead to lost or misplaced supplies, as well as multiple workflows crossing over one another. Some steps may be missed entirely due to their placement in a workflow. Lack of organization, especially on a process-level can lead to confusion, oversight, and mistakes.
Overcrowded workspaces, and the disorganization that can arise within them, can also become a source of lost time, as teams spend more time looking for missing supplies, back tracking processes and maneuvering around people and obstacles.
All of these organizational challenges become amplified as volume increases. A poorly organized workflow, process, or department will become artificially bottlenecked when it’s required to do more in one shift than before.
Time Management
From the 2024 GI Landscape Report, 47.03% of participants enjoyed the fast-paced nature of GI, which may signal that increased volume is a welcomed challenge. However, with the short duration of routine GI procedures relative to other ASC activities, GI volume is already consid
erably higher than that of other procedure types. Widening the purview of preventative care can add to an already fast-paced environment and, if not well planned, can lead to skipped reprocessing steps. Cutting corners to manage limited time can result in adverse outcomes.
Has there been a time when an in-service was cancelled for postponed due to procedural volumes? It’s a natural reaction to prioritize non-immediate activities and reduce task requirements for the day when workload starts to exceed what a team is capable of.
Gastroenterology procedures are continuing to grow in volume across the United States with good reason: many GI procedures, such as colonoscopies, provide life-saving identification of cancers and other diseases earlier than ever before, helping patients and the doctors start the fight against them.
This increase in volume does have a cost, however. GI reprocessing departments, and the nurses and technicians working within them, may not have the capacity to keep up with growing volume while maintaining positive outcomes. Time management, organization, and compliance can all take a hit if departments aren’t prepared for increased volume as their healthcare facility begins scheduling more gastroenterology procedures.
Interested in exploring what GI nurses and technicians from around the country are experiencing?
Download the 2024 GI Reprocessing Landscape Report today!
Resources:
2024 GI Landscape Report
1 https://www.aorn.org/outpatient-surgery/article/running-a-high-volume-gi-center