Surgical coordination remains one of healthcare’s most persistently complex challenges. It relies on a small group of highly skilled yet frequently overstretched staff who must navigate a maze of manual, error-prone workflows — from payer authorizations and medical clearances to preoperative preparation.
The absence of real-time visibility compounds these difficulties. Bottlenecks and breakdowns often surface too late, resulting in missed surgical volumes, canceled or rescheduled cases and reactive problem-solving. Beyond financial losses for clinics, these operational blind spots jeopardize patient care, strain staff well-being and undermine organizational performance.
In a roundtable hosted by LeanTaaS at Becker’s 22nd Annual Spine, Orthopedic and Pain Management-Driven ASC + The Future of Spine Conference, surgeons and healthcare leaders discussed the hidden costs of inefficient surgical coordination. They described how streamlining processes from the clinic to the operating room can increase patient access, reduce administrative burden, reclaim time for surgeons and drive case growth and revenue.
Here are three takeaways from the session:
- Unlocking the ‘black box’ of surgical coordination can reduce costs and improve throughput.
Surgical coordination suffers from a lack of transparency. Surgeons and staff have limited visibility into the pipeline — for example, there’s often no readily available data on how many patients are delayed by authorization issues or which cardiologists are clearing patients for surgery in a timely manner.
In working with hundreds of practices, LeanTaaS found that surgical clinics lose up to 35% of potential cases before they make it to the OR due to breakdowns in surgical coordination. This is a costly problem. “Clinics often lose those patients to other providers in the community, or patients simply elect not to have the treatments that they need,” Ashley Walsh, chief revenue officer at LeanTaaS, said.
One roundtable participant compared the challenges of surgical clinic scheduling to running a successful restaurant: the goal is to keep OR schedules full, just as a restaurant strives to keep tables booked. Yet numerous barriers — such as authorizations and last-minute patient cancellations — make it difficult for clinics to prevent these disruptions from becoming a weekly occurrence, the participant noted.
Despite these challenges, meaningful improvements are within reach.
According to Ashvin Dewan, MD, an orthopedic surgeon and LeanTaaS advisor, at least 72% of those missed opportunities can be recovered through more consistent, reproducible processes for surgical orchestration.
- Digitizing the surgical pipeline enables real-time visibility into bottlenecks and patient leakage.
iQueue for Surgical Clinics is an AI and machine learning-powered solution that automates and streamlines clearances, authorizations and patient education. It also tracks pending, scheduled, completed, held and canceled surgical cases to obstacles, all in one place, to improve case velocity and allow practices to drive surgical volume (LeanTaaS’ partners typically see a 5% to 10% increase) while delivering high-quality care.
“It’s not necessarily that practices are finding more cases, but rather they are preventing the one last-minute reschedule each month,” Dr. Dewan said. “That can generate significant benefits for the bottom line, drive revenue and reduce administrative burden.”
Practices that create a digital surgical pipeline see swift improvements. With real-time visibility, they can detect bottlenecks, intervene to prevent canceled cases and ensure that schedules stay fully booked. This can translate to capturing over $300k of new revenue per surgeon per year. For a 20-surgeon practice, iQueue for Surgical Clinics can generate millions of dollars of missed collections and bring hard-earned money back on the books, the LeanTaaS panelists explained.
- Transforming surgical coordination starts with effective change management.
Rethinking how surgical care is delivered starts with redefining core processes. LeanTaaS begins by understanding every facet of a practice’s surgical workflow and patient journey.
“You can’t just throw technology over the wall and expect it to work,” Dr. Dewan said. “LeanTaaS stands for lean transformation as a service. We build long-term partnerships with teams and help them reimagine surgical care based on best practices.”
Today’s status quo leaves surgical clinics strained by time-consuming manual workflows, frequent cancellations and lost procedures — costing thousands of dollars in revenue each month for every surgeon. LeanTaaS partners with healthcare leaders to discover new ways to tackle these challenges through technology and change management. The result: staff are happier and more productive, more revenue is captured, and no patients are left behind. To learn more and request a demo here.
