By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
Any major hospital must juggle its schedules carefully and sensibly to properly maximize the time of the precious resources of staff and space.
This is especially the case with operating theaters, which are occupied for long hours in a single stretch, but because of unexpected changes in scheduling or operation length, can find themselves empty for extended periods.
Israeli startup Opmed.ai has developed a platform that can rearrange operating room reservations in hospitals, over both long and short term periods, ensuring that each space is used efficiently and to the maximum.
The platform uses AI to optimize schedules for the operating rooms and the surgical teams who use them, Opmed co-founder and CTO Avi Paz tells NoCamels.
The objective is to help the hospitals reduce costs, boost revenue and improve the patient experience – simply by making the most of the rooms they have available on any given day.
According to Opmed, every unused minute in an operating theater is a potential loss of revenue of between $50-150, while an entire unused hour can cost a medical facility up to $1,000.
But integrating its platform, Opmed says, can lead to additional annual income of up to $1 million for each operating suite in a hospital.
The platform works by running billions of different combinations of rooms and surgery times, focusing on short periods when rooms are unused, in order to maximize the use of space and time in the operating suites.
“We [can see] many small gaps in the schedule – half an hour, an hour – here and there,” Opmed co-founder and CEO Dr. Mor Brokman Meltzer, tells NoCamels.
The system then consolidates those gaps by shifting the time and location of operations in order to reduce as much as possible the periods in which operating rooms are unoccupied.
“We run our predictive models, the AI component, we train the models based on the data and now we are able to predict how [a certain day] will look,” says Brokman Meltzer.
The platform also predicts when a procedure will take less time than estimated, and adjusts the scheduling accordingly.
“Some surgeons are not going to fill their block time,” Brokman Meltzer says. “They will have gaps because they overestimated, so they need to release that time. This is really a loss for the hospitals because they have such an expensive resource that is empty.”
The Opmed platform integrates with existing electronic health systems, granting it access to hospital timetables in order to make them more efficient, while crucially, the company says, also taking into account patient needs and even reducing the wait time for an operation.
“We can read their ongoing schedule, and optimize it based on the customer constraints and preferences,” explains Paz.
“We can really improve the efficiency by potential revenue improvement, cost reduction and staff and room utilization,” he says.
And, says Borkman Meltzer, Opmed is the only company that developed a system that allows them to take a hospital schedule and create “a better one” from it.
“What makes us so unique [is] that we are focusing on that vertical, and they really feel that it is tailor made for them,” she explains.
Opmed was created in 2020, after Brokman Meltzer completed a PhD that included an examination of the complexity of planning in wartime.
“We were looking for a place to bring those findings,” she says. “So we started to reach out to Israeli hospitals.”
The other founders were Prof. Baruch Barzel, a physicist and applied mathematician at Bar-Ilan University and the company’s chief scientist, and Paz, who brought with him a wealth of experience from working with a variety of healthcare software during a four-year stint at Microsoft.
It was, Brokman Meltzer says, “a really good match.”
The team began to explore the difficulties in the day-to-day management of operating suites, talking to staff at hospitals both in Israel and the US.
“We saw there was a need, and that they didn’t have the right tools,” says Brokman Meltzer.
It was Paz who took the theoretical concepts and translated them into the platform that today provides a practical solution to this costly and wasteful problem.
The company operates out of Ramat Gan in Israel and Boston in the US, with the staff divided between the two locations, Paz says.
The startup’s 20-strong technical team – engineers, software developers and data scientists – are based in Israel, while the commercial side of the business, comprising about 10 personnel, is run out of Boston under the supervision of Brokman Meltzer.
For now, the focus is on hospital scheduling, and the company has already partnered with multiple facilities in Israel and the US, including the Mayo Clinic, which is the top-ranked medical center in the country with branches in three states.
In May, Opmed raised $15 million in a Series A funding round, which it said will be used to scale up its platform in order to meet the increased demand it is experiencing, in particular in the United States.
“This funding is more than a financial milestone; it’s a validation of our vision to revolutionize healthcare operations with cutting-edge AI and optimization technology,” said Paz at the time.
“Our commitment remains firm: to empower healthcare professionals with solutions that not only address today’s challenges but pave the way for a more efficient and effective future.”
