Operating room scheduling is software that books a hospital's operating theatres and makes sure that the whole surgical team and the equipment are free at the same time. In Indian hospitals, the operating room is usually called the operating theatre, or OT, so the same software is also called OT scheduling.
An operation needs much more than a free room. It needs the surgeon, an anaesthetist (the doctor who puts the patient to sleep and watches the patient during the operation), two or three nurses and a technician. It may need special equipment, such as a portable X-ray machine or a surgical robot. It needs the right instrument trays, sterilised in time, and for a joint replacement, the right size of implant. If any one of these is missing, the operation is delayed or cancelled, and the theatre stands empty.
Most hospitals divide theatre time into blocks. A block is a fixed slot that belongs to one surgeon or one department, such as orthopaedics every Tuesday morning. The software books each operation inside a block. It estimates how long each operation will take from the same surgeon's past operations of the same kind. It also releases blocks that are not going to be used, so that other surgeons can book them.
Say a hospital in Nagpur has six theatres. On a Tuesday, the orthopaedic department has theatre 2 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., which is 360 minutes. Three knee replacements are booked. The software estimates 100 minutes for each, including the time to clean the theatre between patients. That leaves 60 minutes. This is not enough for a fourth knee replacement, but it is enough for a short wrist operation, which the software suggests. It also checks that the anaesthetist is on the roster, that two knee trays will be sterile in time, and that the implant company will deliver the right sizes of knee implants by Monday evening. On Tuesday, the second operation runs 30 minutes late. The software moves the later start times and sends updated messages to the team and to the waiting families.
Theatre time is one of the most expensive resources in a hospital. So even 30 minutes saved in each theatre every day adds up to many more operations in a year.
The scheduling software reads the patient's details from the hospital EHR, the hospital's electronic health record. It reads the staff rosters from the hospital operations platform. It sends the day's list of operations to surgical instrument tracking, so that the right trays are cleaned first. After the operation, the surgeon records what was done in procedure documentation software.