Surgeries are the lifeblood of your practice.
They bring patients through your doors and keep your OR full. They let your surgeons operate at the top of their license. They demand immense skill and deliver incredible value—likely 40% or more of your revenue.
Indeed, surgeries change lives. But the way we schedule them hasn’t changed in decades. It’s an outdated process held together with sticky notes and crossed fingers, and it’s hurting your bottom line. In fact, the #1 reason surgeries get canceled is due to administrative or structural breakdowns during scheduling.
The good news? You’re not alone. Over the past 15+ years, we’ve spoken with hundreds of schedulers across the country about the issues plaguing their process—and the changes they made to fix it.
Now, we’re sharing their findings with you.
These are the top 7 tips from coordinators to help you simplify and streamline your surgical scheduling process:
Tip 1: Standardize your workflow from consult to surgery
In most practices, scheduling workflows aren’t intentionally built. They just happen, and they get tweaked over time to account for unique needs and exceptions. But a patchwork process is vulnerable to human error—and it puts your practice at risk of preventable mistakes.
The solution? Start by documenting your process as it exists today. Ask yourself:
- Who kicks off scheduling?
- Who confirms with the OR?
- Who handles authorizations?
- Who alerts the billing team?
Then, build a simple checklist or flowchart your whole team can reference. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it should be consistent and predictable.
When every team member knows their role, it’s easier to train new staff, track down bottlenecks and prevent cases from falling through the cracks.
Tip 2: Give patients clear, customized information
When patients leave their consult, they often feel overwhelmed. It’s not just the anxiety of needing surgery—it’s keeping track of all the logistics, insurance steps, pre-op instructions and deadlines that come with it.
If you don’t provide clear, personalized information, patients are more likely to call with follow-up questions. Worse, they may miss an important step that delays or cancels their surgery.
That’s why it’s crucial to send each patient home with a customized letter or packet that outlines everything they need to know: the type of surgery they’re having, when and where it’s scheduled, how they should prepare, what still needs to be completed and who to call if they have questions.
You can create these information sheets by hand or use software to automatically generate them. Either way, they should be tailored to each patient—not just generic form letters. The more clarity you give upfront, the fewer phone calls you’ll have to field later.
Tip 3: Track pre-op tasks and case details in one place
Surgery prep involves dozens of moving parts—insurance authorizations, clearances, special equipment, signed consents, you name it. But for most practices, those details and tasks are stored in a million different places. And sometimes, they just live in someone’s head.
That’s why experienced schedulers recommend creating a checklist to track every pre-surgical task, including:
- What needs to be done
- Who’s responsible
- The due date
- The current status
You can build your checklist in whatever platform works best for you—Excel, Google Sheets or a dedicated surgical scheduling platform—and store it in a shared place alongside key case details, like scheduling status and surgeon preferences. Make sure it’s accessible to everyone involved in the surgery so your colleagues don’t waste time chasing missing information.
Tip 4: Eliminate manual work when filling out forms
Surgical scheduling comes with a mountain of paperwork—OR booking sheets, clearance forms, insurance documents, you name it.
In most practices, every form gets filled out by hand. That means retyping the same patient info again and again, copying details from your EHR and hunting down the right form for each facility and payer. It’s slow, repetitive and easy to mess up.
A better approach? Automate it. Implement software that automatically generates the right forms for each procedure, facility and payer—and pre-populates them with patient and case data from your EHR.
Automating the process makes it faster, more accurate and much easier to manage, especially when every form is customized for your practice and stored in one place.
Tip 5: Use templates for common procedures
When a surgeon performs the same procedures over and over, there’s no reason to start from scratch each time. But that’s exactly what happens in many practices: Coordinators have to remember which CPT codes to use, which facility the surgeon prefers, how long the case usually takes and what equipment is needed.
When all that institutional knowledge lives in someone’s head (or in a drawer full of notes), errors are bound to happen.
Templates take the guesswork out of common procedures. With the right setup, you can create a digital template for each surgeon and procedure that includes codes, preferences, case length and facility. That means faster scheduling, fewer mistakes and better alignment with what your surgeon wants and expects.
Tip 6: Fix the handoff from surgery to billing
The procedure might be over, but your revenue depends on what happens next.
After surgery, your billing team needs accurate codes as soon as possible to submit claims. But if you’re capturing codes on paper or handing them off inconsistently, your practice might not get reimbursed for the services you delivered.
To reduce risk and speed up reimbursement, we recommend going digital. Capturing post-op codes electronically ensures the process is secure, standardized and trackable. It also helps your team avoid HIPAA violations and minimizes the need for resubmissions.
The more efficient your handoff, the faster you’ll get paid—and the fewer billing headaches you’ll have to clean up later.
Tip 7: Turn surgical data into actionable insights
Every scheduled case leaves a trail of valuable information—how long it took to book, which forms were missing, how often it was rescheduled or why it was canceled. But most of that data never gets reviewed, let alone used to improve the process.
Don’t let that opportunity go to waste.
Instead, start by identifying a few metrics worth tracking regularly:
- How many surgeries were scheduled this month?
- How many were canceled, and why?
- Which surgeons or procedures take longest to coordinate?
- What’s your average time from consult to case confirmation?
If you’re a small or mid-sized practice, you probably don’t need a full analytics team. You just need a fast and repeatable way to spot trends, bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
When your data is easy to access and act upon, you can use it to inform your operations and make better strategic decisions.
Make your scheduling process work for you
We get it: Surgical scheduling is complex. Simply learning the nuances of your current process is tough enough—let alone overhauling it from the ground up.
But you don’t need to transform everything overnight. You just need to identify the weak points in your current workflows and make measurable, targeted changes, one at a time.
By strengthening just a few parts of your process, you can help your entire team work smarter. That means fewer last-minute scrambles, more predictable revenue and a smoother experience for your surgeons and patients alike.
See how Surgimate can build a modern, convenient scheduling process that meets your practice’s unique needs.
