Solutions

Operating Room Efficiency, Measured in Real Time

Operating rooms are the highest-cost, highest-revenue site of service in the hospital. But the tools most teams rely on tell you what happened only after the day is over. Your EMR charts each interval; it does not measure that interval against what it should have taken, in real time, while there is still time to act.

Photograph: an operating room mid-case, the sort of room whose minutes this page prices
Every minute in the room has a number attached to it.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Your operating rooms are the most expensive service in the hospital, at about $47 a minute per room. Most teams still manage them with no live view of where the minutes go. Synchrony Surgical allows you to define operating room expectations, track every case in real time, and turn the minutes you save into dollars.

$47

per minute, per room: the published industry cost of running an operating room. Small inefficiencies compound fast.

210

surgical metrics to manage in a single day across 6 rooms running 6 cases each. Tracking that by hand, in real time, is not possible.

0

real-time visibility into which room is behind, who is accountable, and where the minutes went. That is the reality in most ORs today.

Getting started with Synchrony Surgical

You can easily improve your operating room efficiency with Synchrony Surgical by defining your workflow, displaying performance live across every room, and analyzing what changed.

Define

Your workflow, your targets

You create the intervals that matter to you, set a time expectation for each, and assign each one to a specific surgical role. Expectations can vary by department and by case type. The standards belong to the hospital, not to an algorithm.

Screenshot: defining interval expectations, each interval with its time expectation and the surgical role that owns it, varying by department and by case type
Screenshot: defining interval expectations, each interval with its time expectation and the surgical role that owns it, varying by department and by case type
Display

Live, across every room

Staff confirm each interval on the tablet: one tap, five per case. Every confirmation reaches the admin analytics dashboard and the in-OR performance display at once. A room falling behind surfaces while there is still time to act.

Screenshot: live display, every room running side by side on the dashboard, each interval confirmed on the tablet and reflected on the web dashboard and the in-OR display at once
Screenshot: live display, every room running side by side on the dashboard, each interval confirmed on the tablet and reflected on the web dashboard and the in-OR display at once
Analysis

What changed, and by how much

Performance slices by role, by individual, by department, and by period. Minutes convert to dollars on screen. When the data shows an expectation was set wrong, you revise it in Define and start measuring against the corrected target.

Screenshot: analytics, performance sliced by role, by individual, by department and by period, with minutes converted to dollars on screen
Screenshot: analytics, performance sliced by role, by individual, by department and by period, with minutes converted to dollars on screen

See how Synchrony measures every interval across the full platform.

Not another retrospective report

Real-time, not after the fact

An EMR records what happened. Synchrony measures each interval against its expectation as the case runs, so a delay is something you can still act on today.

Accountability by role

Every interval is assigned to a specific surgical role. Minutes saved or lost are attributed to the person responsible, not just to the room. The attribution works in both directions, so no one is blamed for a delay that wasn’t theirs.

Turnaround, tracked

Most systems don’t measure the time between cases. Synchrony does, and it is often the single metric that shows where a full day’s capacity is quietly lost. See turnaround time tracking in detail.

What your EMR does, and what it does not

Most surgical teams already record case times, and conclude from that they have what Synchrony provides. Recording a time and running an efficient room are two different jobs. The expectation agreed before the case, the live display that changes what happens during it, and the analysis that raises the standard afterwards all sit around the data point, and that is where the minutes are.

Operating room efficiency capabilities, compared between Synchrony Surgical and a hospital EMR.
CapabilitySynchronyYour EMR
Communication of expectationsProvidedNot provided
Pre-op readinessProvidedNot provided
Anesthesia on-time sign-inProvidedNot provided
Surgeon on-time sign-inProvidedNot provided
First case in roomProvidedProvided
In Room to Anesthesia ReadyProvidedNot provided
Anesthesia Ready to CutProvidedNot provided
Cut to CloseProvidedProvided
Close to Out of RoomProvidedProvided
Turnaround time recordedProvidedProvided
Turnaround surfaced as a live metricProvidedNot provided
Reasons for delayProvidedNot provided
Real-time display driving performanceProvidedNot provided
Automated and customizable analyticsProvidedNot provided
Data visible without a manual exportProvidedNot provided

Your EMR covers four of the fifteen. All four are timestamps it writes down after the fact, which is enough for a report and too late for the room.

Proof

Proof the method works

Defining and measuring interval expectations cut turnover from 47 to 20 minutes at the Spine & Joint Institute.

They did it manually, starting from a co-management agreement in 2012: a champion, a stopwatch, and a shared standard. As surgeons moved cases to the site that respected their time, case volume tripled over four years. Synchrony is how you run that same method across every room, without a spreadsheet and a single champion holding it together.

Read the Case Study

47 → 20

min turnover

case volume, four years

2012

co-management agreement

2024

digitized with Synchrony

The rest of the surgical day

Time is lost in three places, and they compound: a late first case pushes every case behind it, and slow turnarounds push them again.

Sign-in and First Case on-time Start

Pre-Op, anesthesia, and surgeon readiness

Turnaround Time

Patient out to next patient in

See your OR minutes in dollars

Start with a 60-Day Assessment and watch the minutes add up, or measure continuously from day one. Request a demo and we’ll show you all three steps running on your own workflow.

Request a Demo