By Jacob Ruffin, Client Success Manager

Specialty practices can pursue greater surgical throughput without immediately adding administrative overhead by reducing manual searching, surfacing exceptions earlier, clarifying ownership, supporting coverage, and standardizing the essential order-to-OR workflow. The first step is to understand where existing coordinator time and intended cases are being lost to operational friction.

Find the hidden administrative load

Administrative effort often hides in status checks, duplicate entry, inbox searches, repeated follow-up, spreadsheet reconciliation, coverage handoffs, and last-minute escalation. These activities may be necessary in a fragmented process, but they do not always move the case forward.

To see where this shows up in your process, start by mapping the work around one delayed or difficult case. Note how many systems and people were involved, where information was missing, and when the risk became visible.

This friction has a measurable cost: peer-reviewed research on elective surgical cancellations found that implementing evidence-based, process-level interventions meaningfully reduced cancellation rates, indicating that much of this loss is addressable rather than an unavoidable cost of doing business¹.

Manage by exception

If coordinators must review every case to find the few that need attention, the process does not scale. A stronger workflow makes normal progression visible and brings unresolved exceptions forward.

Each exception should show the reason, owner, next action, and timing. This reduces the effort required to answer, “What needs attention now?”

The value of this kind of ownership is not just intuitive. A study of operating room coordinators found that those who were empowered to exercise judgment on case-level risk scheduled significantly more cases over the study period, without a meaningful increase in after-hours operating time or elective cancellation. Evidence that clear ownership and visibility change throughput outcomes, not just workload².

Standardize without adding a reporting layer

Use shared readiness definitions, required fields, escalation rules, and coverage practices across locations. Capture those elements through the daily workflow so leaders do not need a separate manual report.

The objective is not identical local work. It is a consistent operating language that makes performance easier to compare and improve.

This pattern holds up in practice: a tertiary hospital that redesigned its OR scheduling process around standardized steps and information requirements demonstrated measurable efficiency gains, supporting the idea that consistency in the underlying workflow — not an added layer of oversight — is what improves performance³.

Measure the result carefully

Track coordinator time on manual status work, exception age, case progression, reschedules, cancellations, and performed cases. Establish baselines and definitions before claiming improvement. Throughput may also depend on surgeon demand, facility capacity, clinical factors, and patient choice.

Surgimate supports the operational layer between order and OR, connecting leadership visibility with the coordinator workflows that drive current data.

Find the operational friction in your surgical pipeline.

References

1. Viderman D, Sarria-Santamera A, Umbetzhanov Y, Ismailova A, Ben-David B. Implementation of evidence-based recommendations to reduce elective surgical case cancellations. J Healthc Qual Res. 2021;36(2):59-65. doi:10.1016/j.jhqr.2020.10.009
2. Stepaniak PS, Mannaerts GH, de Quelerij M, de Vries G. The effect of the operating room coordinator’s risk appreciation on operating room efficiency. Anesth Analg. 2009;108(4):1249-1256. doi:10.1213/ane.0b013e318195e109
3. Park HS, Kim SH, Bong MR, Choi DK, Kim WJ, Ku SW, Ro YJ, Choi IC. Optimization of the operating room scheduling process for improving efficiency in a tertiary hospital. J Med Syst. 2020;44(9):171. doi:10.1007/s10916-020-01644-0