TrakCare Operating Theatres

TrakCare Operating Theatres as part of one connected patient record — improving safety, flow and performance across the hospital

The InterSystems TrakCare^® Operating Theatres (OT) module, seamlessly connects every point within the OT department into the familiar single, unified patient record. The same digital record used across wards, outpatients, emergency department, diagnostics and management, TrakCare OT enables safer surgery, smoother handovers and better use of scarce theatre capacity.

Real-time updates keep your entire clinical and operational team in the loop, while everything is tracked on a single, continuous patient record.

Delivering what matter to clinical teams every day - from preventing delays and bottlenecks to improving handovers and reducing variation in care. Fewer delays, fewer handover failures, and clearer decision-making before, during and after surgery.

TrakCare Operating Theatres is not about replacing one theatre system with another.

It is about placing theatres where they belong: at the centre of a connected, reliable and resilient patient record — supporting safer care, better flow and sustainable performance.

Benefits

Professional Surgeons and Assistants Talk and Use Digital Tablet Computer while Standing in the Modern Hospital Operating Room.

Safer peri-operative care

A single, trusted patient record follows the patient from referral and pre-assessment, through theatre, into recovery and onward care. Allergies, comorbidities, escalation plans and results are always current, reducing risk in time-critical environments.

Stronger handovers, lower cognitive load

Information is captured once and reused across theatre, recovery, wards and outpatients. Structured handovers reduce reliance on memory and manual summaries, supporting safer transitions of care.

Improved theatre and bed utilisation

Real-time visibility of theatre progress, patient status and downstream capacity enables better coordination with bed management and site teams — reducing late starts, overruns and avoidable cancellations.

Reduced administrative burden

Intra-operative data automatically supports discharge summaries, coding, audit, infection surveillance and performance reporting, removing the need for duplicate documentation and secondary reporting.

Meaningful operational insight

Standardised data across theatres supports reliable utilisation metrics, quality indicators and improvement programmes — without disrupting local clinical workflows.

Impact for the Health Boards

TrakCare Operating Theatres supports NHS priorities by embedding theatres within a unified digital foundation rather than adding another system to manage. This means:

Fewer delays and cancellations caused by missing or conflicting information
Safer surgical pathways through reliable, real-time data
Improved flow across theatres, wards and critical care
Stronger data quality for performance management and improvement

By reducing fragmentation, organisations gain resilience as well as efficiency.

Improving patient flow and reducing waiting lists

Reducing elective backlog depends on more than theatre scheduling alone. It requires alignment between theatres, beds, diagnostics, staffing and post-operative capacity.
TrakCare enables this by:

Making theatre activity visible to bed management and site teams in real time
Allowing constraints such as bed capacity or outbreaks to be seen early by theatre teams
Supporting faster turnaround through clearer coordination across departments

Potential Impact for the NHS:

More procedures completed per session
Fewer late starts and early finishes
Better delivery against elective recovery targets

Potential Impact for the NHS:

More procedures completed per session

Potential Impact for the NHS:

More procedures completed per session

Shot of a surgeon looking at a monitor in an operating room

Enabling the shift to prevent harm rather than creating it

Safer surgery starts well before the patient enters theatre.
By connecting pre-assessment, diagnostics and historical clinical data directly into the theatre workflow, TrakCare helps teams identify and mitigate risk earlier — reducing last-minute cancellations and post-operative complications.
This supports:

Earlier identification of comorbidity-related risk
Better alignment of antibiotic prophylaxis with allergies and microbiology
Reliable capture of data for audit, quality improvement and surveillance

Potential Impact for the NHS:

Fewer avoidable cancellations
Reduced complications and length of stay
Stronger insight into surgical outcomes and variation

Challenges —
and how TrakCare addresses them

Challenge	Solution
Multiple systems in theatres	A single EPR with one login and one patient record
Siloed information across departments	Real-time, shared data across theatres, wards, ICU, pharmacy and diagnostics
Fragile handovers to recovery and critical care	Structured data flowing with the patient, not stopping at the theatre door
Operational blind spots	Hospital-wide visibility of theatre activity and downstream capacity

Frequently Asked Questions

Why change from standalone systems if it already works well?

Standalone systems can run theatres effectively as a standalone tool. The reason for change is not that theatres “don’t work” — it is that standalone systems fragment information.

TrakCare Operating Theatres embeds theatre workflows into the enterprise patient record, so documentation, timings and safety steps are visible across wards, recovery, ICU, ED and clinics. This reduces duplication, improves coordination and strengthens governance.

How does this improve patient safety in practical terms?

Safety improves through:

Immediate availability of operative and anaesthetic notes
Reduced information loss at handover
Fewer transcription errors
Clear audit trails
Consistent completion of safety checklists

The key benefit is that theatre events sit in the same record as the rest of the patient’s care.

Will this slow theatre lists down?

Most theatre delays arise from coordination problems — late starts, bed delays, missing information — rather than documentation itself.

By improving visibility of list progress and reducing system switching, TrakCare supports smoother coordination. Early optimisation and effective training help ensure workflows remain efficient.

Will operative notes be available immediately to wards and recovery?

Yes. Operative and anaesthetic documentation becomes visible as soon as it is completed for safer and more efficient handover.

Recovery, wards, ICU and emergency teams can see the plan without waiting for scanning, transcription or chasing theatres.

Does this change how the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist works?

No. The checklist remains a team-led safety process.
Digitisation improves traceability and audit, but it does not replace the shared team conversation during sign-in, time-out and sign-out.

How does this support elective recovery and patient flow?

TrakCare is an organisation wide record that provides clearer insight into:

Late starts
Turnaround times
Cancellation reasons
Downstream bed constraints

This enables targeted improvement work and links theatre activity to whole-hospital flow rather than treating theatres in isolation.

Will this be used to performance-manage individual clinicians?

The system provides transparent data about list performance and timings.
How that data is used is determined by local governance and leadership. A mature approach focuses on system constraints and service improvement rather than simplistic individual attribution.

Does this reduce cancellations?

It can reduce avoidable cancellations caused by missing information, poor coordination or late recognition of constraints.
It will not remove cancellations driven by clinical deterioration, emergency pressures or workforce shortages.

What happens if the system is unavailable during a list?

Organisations agree downtime procedures in advance.
Clinical care continues using agreed contingency processes, with retrospective documentation entered once systems are restored. Safe care delivery takes priority.

What does TrakCare Operating Theatres deliberately not do?

For clarity, it does not: