How to Automate LeanTaaS iQueue

Block time is property, and surgeons treat it that way

LeanTaaS builds capacity software for the parts of a hospital where the resource is physical, finite and expensive. iQueue comes in three forms: for operating rooms, for infusion centres and for inpatient flow. The common problem is that an hour of unused capacity cannot be saved for later. It is simply gone.

In the operating room that problem has a political dimension the others do not. Block time is allocated to a surgeon or a service line, and it is understood by everyone involved as something closer to property than to a booking. Giving it up feels like losing standing, so it tends not to be given up, even when it is going unused week after week.

The result is a hospital with a surgical waiting list and an operating room sitting dark on a Thursday afternoon. Both facts are true at once, in the same building, often on the same corridor. Reconciling them is as much a negotiation as a calculation.

Releasing a block is a decision somebody has to remember

Before any of this is analytics, it is a person sending messages to surgeons' offices and waiting.

The OR office watches the release deadline for each block and emails the practices that have not used theirs. A scheduler in one of those offices has to check the surgeon's clinic diary, decide whether a case is likely, and reply. Somebody else rings around to find out whether the released Thursday afternoon can be taken by anyone at short notice. Somebody checks whether the case they want to move in has its cardiology clearance back yet.

It is a week of small negotiations conducted by email, and the deadline arrives whether or not anyone replied. None of the people who need to reply work for the hospital, which is the part that makes it slow. When nobody answers, the block stays allocated, the room stays empty, and the patient at the top of the waiting list stays there for another month.

LeanTaaS iQueue

Open time offered where a case exists Surgery office waiting lists read before the release goes out, so Thursday's freed room is offered to a practice with a patient ready for it.

Clearances back before the date Outside cardiology and pulmonology portals checked ahead of time, so a case is not cancelled at six on the morning of surgery.

Devices confirmed in the building Vendor order tracking read for the implant a case depends on, so a room is not held for hardware that is still in transit.

Smart Match works with the schedule in front of it

It is worth being fair about how much of this iQueue has genuinely taken off people, because it is the part that used to be a spreadsheet and a committee.

Case Length Accuracy predicts how long a case will actually run, including complex multi-panel work, which is what makes a forecast worth acting on. Proactive release reminders reach block owners before the deadline rather than after it. Freed time is listed in a block marketplace so open slots are visible instead of being hunted for, and Smart Match offers that time to the surgeon it fits best rather than to whoever replies first. Alongside those, benchmarking and staffing forecasting cover the rest of the perioperative week.

Every one of those decisions is made from the hospital's own scheduling history and its own calendar.

What that history does not contain is the surgeon's clinic list, the outside cardiologist's opinion, the device rep's shipping confirmation, or the block the same surgeon holds at an outpatient centre across town. The offer is made into a fog, which is why so many good offers go unanswered.

Filling open time means reaching offices outside the hospital

An offer of open time is only as good as the office it lands in, and those offices run their own software.

Each practice's own scheduling portal checked for patients approved and waiting to be booked, so Thursday's freed afternoon is offered first to the office that visibly has three cases for it. Pre-operative clearances collected from the outside cardiology and pulmonology practices that never interfaced, so a case is confirmed as ready to proceed rather than assumed to be.

Implant and hardware orders read from the vendor's own tracking, so a room is not held for a case whose device is still moving through a courier network. The surgeon's blocks at the outpatient centre checked, so an offer is not made for a day they are already operating elsewhere. Anaesthesia cover confirmed for the room being added, before the room is added.

In a hospital the line stays where it is. Gathering runs unattended and on a schedule. Any edit to a record, and anything going out to a surgeon, a practice or a patient, is put in front of a qualified person to send. The scheduling judgement belongs to the OR office.

The offer goes out while the room is still open

Released time is worth something for a few days and nothing afterwards, so the answers about who could use it have to arrive inside that window.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in the way your staff are. It opens each practice portal, the outside specialist's site or the device vendor's order page, reads what is there, and returns a short list against the blocks in question.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, sessions are not shared between tools, and a workflow can be locked to an explicit list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it.

The workflows below are already built, and each names exactly what it opens.