Improving Patient Flow Across the Perioperative Pathway: Why True, End-to-End Solutions Matter More Than Ever

Thought LeadershipAbout our SolutionsPreoperative care

11 Mar

With elective recovery a top priority in the NHS, improving patient flow through perioperative pathways becomes a necessary step towards achieving the 18-week target.

Hospitals are increasingly turning to digital solutions to address inefficiencies in patient flow, and the technologies that will contribute significantly to this goal will be workflow solutions. Ones that consider the entire pathway and ensure each step flows seamlessly into the next, because focusing on a single bottleneck without considering the full patient journey risks shifting the problem elsewhere.

The risk of isolated fixes in perioperative pathways

Take preoperative assessments (POA) as an example. If sending screening questionnaires is identified as a bottleneck, hospitals may implement a solution to automate questionnaire distribution.

Once a patient is listed for surgery, the system automatically sends a preoperative screening questionnaire. But what happens next?

A sent questionnaire is just the beginning. It triggers multiple actions that must be managed:

What happens when patients don’t engage remotely?
How do you manage non-responders or those with missing contact details?
What about those who start but don’t complete the questionnaire?
For those who do respond, how do you prioritise their next steps?

If downstream workflows aren’t optimised—if non-responders aren’t followed up, if scheduling inefficiencies persist, if surgeons lack real-time access to POAs—then patient flow doesn’t improve. One bottleneck is simply replaced with another.

A digital end-to-end preoperative pathway

A true workflow solution ensures that every action provides the tools to manage the next, creating a connected and automated process.

With Pathpoint ePOA, for example, all patients receive a digital screening questionnaire once they’re listed for surgery, and it then addresses the downstream actions automatically:

Reminders to complete the questionnaire, which has proven to improve response rates.
Non-responders or those without contact details are flagged and added to a dedicated worklist for admin to follow up.
Completed responses generate complexity scores, streamlining risk stratification and ensuring patients are optimised before surgery.
Pathways can be linked—for example, a patient needing diabetic care is automatically connected to a diabetic pathway, keeping all patient information visible in one place instead of scattered across separate systems.

With an end-to-end workflow in preoperative care, clinicians manage everything on one platform—from when a patient needs a POA to when they’re ready for surgery, with everything in between.

Scaling the impact across the full perioperative pathway

Now, apply this approach across the entire perioperative pathway.

Imagine a fully connected workflow that guides patients from referral to recovery without delays, miscommunication, or missing data; every step is continuous with the next.

With Pathpoint, for example, it would look like this:

Referral management: Patients enter the system efficiently, with all relevant information structured and presented clearly, ensuring they are directed to the right services from the start.
Waiting list management: Preoperative workflows, including POAs, trigger automatically once a patient is listed, eliminating manual coordination delays.
Preoperative assessment & optimisation: Patient complexity scores are automatically calculated from screening questionnaires, with responses, complexity scores, and relevant clinical data automatically populating the assessment. Cases requiring specialist input (e.g., diabetes, cardiology, haematology) are flagged and integrated within the preoperative pathway.
Theatre scheduling & coordination: A real-time theatre scheduling system provides an overview of surgical states, cancellations, and capacity, including patient tags, equipment requests, and total theatre time estimation to enhance planning and reduce inefficiencies.
Intraoperative tracking & reporting: Every procedure is thoroughly documented with logs of patient timings, equipment usage, staff involvement, and additional notes, ensuring comprehensive, structured intraoperative reporting.
Postoperative monitoring & follow-up: Automated PROMs/PREMs collection enables long-term patient monitoring, with at-risk patients flagged for intervention, supporting proactive post-op care.

This end-to-end, single-platform solution is the future of perioperative pathways.

But beyond workflow efficiency, the data generated from a fully digitised pathway holds enormous potential.

Using Pathpoint as an example again, all data is captured with SNOMED-CT coding, ensuring structured, standardised information with granular detail. This makes analysing outcomes, identifying trends, and optimising care pathways far more effective.

Take preoperative optimisation and its impact on length of stay. It’s a complex, nuanced area with multiple influencing factors. But when pathways are fully linked and data is captured at a granular level of detail, hospitals gain a far deeper, data-driven understanding of patient flow and outcomes.

The only way to achieve this level of insight is with an end-to-end system.

Ideally, this would be a single platform, but most hospitals operate with separate solutions for each stage and often acquire solutions with an ‘individual product’ mindset. This must change because even when these systems function well individually, if they don’t connect, patient flow remains fragmented, preventing hospitals from achieving any real efficiency gains.