The power of the right questions: Why OR intelligence begins with visibility

How Proximie’s Intelligence Suite gives Operating Room (OR) teams the clarity they need to ask the right questions and why that’s the first step toward real, sustainable improvement in surgery.

"Having really good data is the only way that you're going to improve,” Ryan Kerstein, Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Lead for The Royal College of Surgeons of England Innovation Hub, explained in a recent episode of This is Surgery. “The adage when it comes to AI is rubbish in, means rubbish out, and this is key. Unless we're collecting high quality data, we can't have the kind of insights that are needed to change our process flows, to change how we do things and to get better." 

The modern OR is one of the most complex, high-stakes and costly environments in healthcare. Teams are under constant pressure to deliver safe, efficient care, often against the backdrop of limited resources and growing surgical backlogs. It's highly pressurised, it's high-stakes. Yet for all the surgical brilliance that takes place in the OR, many of the most basic operational questions are surprisingly difficult to answer: 

• Why did this case start late?
• How long does a typical turnover really take in our hospital?
• Where are cancellations creeping in, and why?
• Which lists are consistently running over, and what’s driving that pattern?

Too often, the answers are anecdotal, manually entered and fragmented, or based on incomplete data. In many ORs, visibility continues to be the missing piece and without visibility, it’s impossible to ask, let alone answer, the right questions about what went right and what went wrong in your OR. In an environment as crucial to healthcare as the OR, we need to take better care of the key data that can ultimately form a picture of total performance.  

Why visibility matters

"We’re almost shooting in the dark and you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” Dr. Nadine Hachach-Haram, CEO and Founder of Proximie. 

It’s a simple truth, but one that has historically held the OR back. Critical insights like surgical timings, staffing patterns, device usage, or workflow bottlenecks either live in siloed or manual systems, or don’t exist at all. 

Without a connected and objective view, inefficiencies remain hidden or hard to quantify, making it difficult for teams to learn, adapt, and drive positive change across their healthcare system. To do more with less, which every healthcare system in the world is being asked to do at a time of universal workforce shortages, growing demand for healthcare, ageing populations and budget cuts, we need to lift the veil on the mythical arena of the OR. That’s why visibility is the foundation of true OR intelligence. 

That’s why visibility is the foundation of true OR intelligence. As health systems worldwide move toward value-based and data-driven care, visibility in the OR isn’t just operational; it’s foundational to delivering measurable outcomes and sustainable improvement.

Once teams can truly see what’s really happening, they can start to ask the right questions, and those questions become the engine of sustainable improvement across their healthcare system.

Introducing the Proximie Intelligence Suite

Proximie’s Intelligence Suite was designed to provide not just this foundation but a launchpad to bring smarter, more intelligent surgery to life. 

Proximie gives OR teams a single source of truth and real-time insights that can elevate a whole healthcare system’s surgical workflow. Our platform delivers real-time workflow orchestration, secure collaboration, ambient data capture and AI powered insights that expand into real-time notifications and advanced analytics. All in a simple to use, integrated software platform built to scale. 

Proximie’s Intelligence Suite provides teams with three integrated modules: 

• Forecast: Proximie’s Forecast tool brings clarity to pre-surgical planning by optimising surgical lists up to six weeks in advance, helping teams improve OR utilisation before patients even reach the OR. Using AI-powered predictions that account for surgeon patterns, scheduling, workflow and case mix, it highlights inefficiencies like lists likely to finish early and flags underutilised blocks or risk-prone schedules. With clear visualisation against hospital targets and the ability to view by site, specialty, OR, or clinician, teams can redistribute cases, adjust staff allocation, and plan smarter based on real data. The result is improved utilisation, fewer cancellations, and more efficient pre-planning, because surgery starts before you’ve even entered the OR.
  
  
• Live-status: dashboard gives surgical and operational teams a real-time, system-wide view of every OR, case, and site, combining computer vision data with EHR insights to track progress, flag risks, and surface crucial details like delays, wait times, or patient-specific factors. Teams can filter and sort by OR, specialty, or site to prioritise the most at-risk cases, while coordinating perioperative staff more effectively. Designed to prevent disruption before it happens, the technology enables faster decision-making, keeps patients moving safely through surgery, and helps staff finish their day on time.
  
  
• Insights: Proximie’s Insights dashboard gives surgical teams a retrospective view of OR performance across sites, specialties, teams, and time, combining three years of EHR data with computer vision insights to surface key operational metrics. From late starts, prolonged turnovers, and cancellations to overruns, and surgical volumes, Proximie enables teams to see the full picture of their operative workflow via a single dashboard. Fully filterable by specialty, OR, date, site, or day of the week, it makes it easy to spot patterns, pinpoint bottlenecks, and quantify lost hours to delays or underutilised blocks. By revealing where inefficiencies occur, Insights helps teams focus improvement efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
  
  

Together, these tools create a continuous cycle of insight and actionable data that can help shape a healthcare system’s understanding of their operations: before, during and after surgery. The ability to see what’s happening now, learn from what happened yesterday, and plan better for tomorrow.

From visibility to better questions

With this visibility, OR teams no longer have to rely on hunches or assumptions made in the moment. Proximie paints the brightest picture of any given OR, using ambient data.  

They can ask sharper, more targeted questions:

• What proportion of our delays are linked to instrument readiness?
• Why is OR five always running behind post patient ready? 
• Why are certain surgical specialties more prone to cancellations, and what can be done upstream?
• How many hours of OR time are lost each week to late starts and how do we win them back now?

The answers aren’t abstract. They’re actionable and they provide a clear path to improvements that benefit everyone; from patients, staff, and the wider healthcare system.

The first step toward sustainable improvement

The power of Proximie’s Intelligence Suite doesn’t just lie in the data it captures, but in what that data makes possible. It transforms the unseen into the visible, and the visible into the actionable. 

By starting with visibility, OR teams gain the ability to ask better questions. Those questions lead to smarter decisions. Smarter decisions lead to stronger outcomes because real improvement doesn’t begin with solutions, it begins with the clarity to ask the right questions.

The Proximie Intelligence Suite: making surgery more connected, more visible, and more intelligent - one question, one insight, one action at a time. For a demo, click here. 

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