FDP digital scheduling tool improves theatre utilisation, finds study

A digital scheduling tool on the NHS federated data platform (FDP) led to improvements in theatre utilisation, according to an evaluation by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The inpatient care coordination solution (IP CSS) tool is designed to aid with theatre scheduling by ensuring that clinicians have the data they need to prioritise patients with the most urgent needs and book slots for surgery.

A study, published by BMJ Health Care Informatics on 12 March, assessed changes in theatre utilisation and cancellations following the tool’s adoption at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and West Middlesex University Hospital in January 2022.

It found that implementation was linked to improvements in theatre utilisation, with booked and actual utilisation 15% and 12.2% higher, respectively, than counterfactual estimates.

The number of weekly bookings per session increased from 3.5 to 3.8 in six months, representing an overall 10.9% rise for the post-intervention period.

Elena Lammila-Escalera, research assistant in digital health at Imperial College London and co-author of the study, said in a LinkedIn post: “These findings suggest digital coordination tools can help teams use operating theatres more efficiently, potentially reducing delays and supporting efforts to tackle the elective care backlog.”

Although there was a 2.1% weekly increase in cancellation rates in the period after the tool was introduced, the study’s authors state that “the absolute change was negligible”, with the median cancellation rates remaining stable at 5.2% before and after the scheduling tool was implemented.

Study limitations 

However the analysis was not designed to disaggregate operational components, examine intermediate processes or analyse theatre setting, and the trust’s legacy scheduling system remained available throughout the study period.

Kanthan Theivendran, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon and peer-reviewer at BMJ Digital Health and AI, pointed to “critical blind spots and confounding factors” in the evaluation.

He said in a LinkedIn post: “Because staff could freely use existing non-FDP tools, we cannot definitively attribute the observed improvements solely to the new IP CCS tool; this staggered and partial adoption adds significant confounding and bias to the results.”

He added that the study “does not provide any hard data on IP CCS system usage, such as the number of staff logins, active users, or time spent navigating the software” and highlighted a lack of  qualitative user feedback from schedulers, clinicians, or theatre staff to indicate whether the tool is user-friendly, efficient, or hindering their workflow.

Theivendran called for a “wider, multi-trust review to see if these results are replicated”.

“While digital transformation is crucial for tackling the NHS elective backlog, we need robust, user-centric data to prove a tool’s worth.

“We cannot rely on system level correlations while ignoring actual user behaviour, login metrics, and the reality of parallel legacy systems,” he said.

NHS England says that 39 trusts were realising benefits from using the theatres module of IP CCS at the end of September 2025.

According to NHS figures, 80,923 additional patients have undergone procedures in theatres, compared to the previous period without NHS FDP use.

Meanwhile, doctors groups have raised safety concerns over an AI discharge tool which is planned to be rolled out nationally through the FDP.