Your theatre is booked all day. How many hours did it operate?

An operation theatre is the most expensive room in the hospital. Its list is planned the day before.

Then the first case starts late, and everything after it moves. Nobody records why it started late, so the same twenty-five minutes are lost every morning.

Each case records its own timestamps, so the pattern of first-case delay becomes visible in a fortnight.

The doctor says the patient can go home at 10am. The patient leaves at 6pm.

In between are a summary, a pharmacy return, a billing clearance and an insurance approval — each waiting on the one before it, none of them visible to the person waiting in the bed.

Each step is a stage with an owner, visible on one screen, so the bottleneck is known at 11am not at 6pm.

Insurance claims are submitted, queried, resubmitted and sometimes shortfall-settled months later.

Every query has a reason. The reasons are never grouped, so the same documentation gap causes the same query on hundreds of claims.

Each query reason is recorded against the claim, so a recurring gap becomes a checklist item at admission.