The bottleneck was the OR, not the surgeons
St. Aurel’s orthopedic department had a 14-week waiting list for knee replacement and no budget for a new operating room. The team needed capacity, not more rooms.
“We didn’t need to operate faster. We needed to stop losing time to variability.”
An internal audit found that most of the variance in case time came from intraoperative decisions: implant sizing, gap balancing and repeated trialing.
A six-month evaluation, with exit criteria
Instead of a capital decision up front, the hospital joined Veyra’s clinical evaluation program, with success criteria agreed in advance: skin-to-skin time, length of stay and surgeon-reported workload.
Finance chose pay-per-procedure for the evaluation period, to keep the program off the capital budget until the data was in.
First case in 84 days
Installation and IT integration took four weeks. Two surgeons and eight OR staff completed Academy certification, and the first case was proctored on day 84.
“The planning session the night before is now the most useful meeting of our week.”
Case times were longer for the first 20 cases, as expected, and then fell below the conventional baseline.
18% less OR time, 0.8 fewer days in hospital
Over months 7 to 18, mean skin-to-skin time fell from 112 to 92 minutes, and length of stay from 2.9 to 2.1 days. That capacity added 3 knee lists a month without a new room.
The hospital converted to a capital purchase in month 9, with a lease structure for the second system.
Next: hip, and a regional network
St. Aurel now plans hip arthroplasty on ARC and shares anonymized case data with two partner hospitals through Veyra Connect, to compare outcomes across the network.
Every number in this story comes from the hospital’s own registry and is available to peers on request.