Following a $223.5 million Stage 3A expansion delivered in late 2023, one of the largest infrastructure investments in its history, LRH significantly expanded its operating theatre capacity, a 18-bed ICU, a new maternity unit and diagnostic imaging services—increasing the scale and complexity of its surgical operations.

Recognising that infrastructure improvements needed to be matched by digital transformation, LRH launched the Sunrise Surgical Care and Provation iPro Expansion Project. This initiative modernised perioperative workflows and supported the hospital’s mission to deliver safer, more efficient and patient-centred care.

From implementation to evidence: What the data reveals

The deployment of Sunrise Surgical Care and Provation iPro at LRH has already been documented as a landmark in Australian surgical digitisation – the first integrated deployment of its kind in the country, delivering real-time theatre scheduling, electronic anaesthesia documentation, and a Patient Procedure Tracker that gives families live updates throughout the surgical journey.

Following implementation, LRH undertook a rigorous, ethics-approved clinical research study to quantify exactly what changed, benchmarking more than 8,000 surgical episodes to produce the kind of objective, peer-reviewable evidence that moves the sector from anecdote to insight.

The findings demonstrate that the platform has delivered something beyond operational gains: a continuous, ethics-approved evidence base that positions LRH at the forefront of data-driven perioperative care in regional Australia.

“The primary challenge in high-volume surgical services is that scheduling variance is often invisible at scale. Without objective data, operations are managed by anecdote rather than evidence. By implementing Sunrise Surgical Care and Provation iPro, we have successfully benchmarked nearly 8,000 cases, providing the transparency required to move beyond guesswork.”

Jon Millar
Chief Operating Officer, Latrobe Regional Health

A rigorous, ethics-approved methodology

LRH developed and submitted a research protocol to the Latrobe Regional Health Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), which issued a formal Certificate of Approval. This enabled structured analysis of data generated following the implementation of Sunrise Surgical Care and Provation iPro, with the intention of producing findings suitable for formal publication.

Data was extracted from both systems, capturing scheduling, perioperative workflow, and anaesthetic documentation. It was cleaned for completeness and timestamped for integrity before analysis. The study examined two comparable six-month windows:

• Baseline period: May–October 2024
• Post-implementation period: May–October 2025

The resulting dataset of more than 8,000 surgical episodes was analysed across four operational domains: theatre times and utilisation, elective and emergency case volumes, emergency referral-to-surgery timing by clinical priority and Schedule 8 (controlled drug) medication reconciliation.

Capacity and stability: Growth without volatility

The headline result is not simply that LRH did more – it is that it did more, consistently and more reliably. Between the two study periods, LRH demonstrated simultaneous growth and stabilisation across its surgical service:

• Total procedures increased by approximately 5%, driven by a 17% surge in elective activity and an eight-percentage-point shift in elective share.
• Theatre utilisation improved by approximately 25%, and theatre start-time delays fell by approximately 20% – with 36% of cases now commencing within 30 minutes of their scheduled time.
• Median actual case durations are running 21 minutes shorter than projected, enabling better downstream scheduling and recovery planning.
• Month-to-month variability—a critical indicator of operational predictability and staff satisfaction—fell by approximately 50%. The coefficient of variation moved from 0.116 to 0.059, effectively halving the “swings” in throughput from one month to the next.

In high-volume surgical services, volatility is the enemy of both safety and workforce wellbeing. The ability to demonstrate a 50% reduction in that volatility while simultaneously growing elective activity by 17% is among the most significant findings in the dataset.

Perioperative flow: Eighty-seven percent timestamp completeness across 6,012 cases

Across 6,012 surgical cases analysed in May–October 2025, 87% achieved a complete digital perioperative timestamp chain. This depth of workflow visibility, previously impossible to achieve at scale, establishes a measurable baseline for every transition point across the surgical episode.

Median transition intervals recorded across the dataset were:

• Anaesthesia preparation to incision: 24 minutes
• Surgery duration: 27 minutes
• Surgery end to out of theatre: 5 minutes
• Out of theatre to PACU: 3 minutes

Prior to implementation, achieving this level of visibility required labour-intensive manual reconciliation and was impossible to perform at scale or in real time. LRH can now identify variation at the procedure, service, and theatre level, and act on it.

“This doesn’t indicate increased drug wastage – it indicates increased governance visibility. Controlled substance management is now embedded, timestamped, auditable and scalable. This is a structural shift in risk control, not a reporting enhancement.”

Janelle McInnes
General Manager Surgical Services, Latrobe Regional Health

Emergency surgical access: Stratified, measurable, auditable

One of the most operationally significant findings from the study is the first-ever stratified, auditable view of emergency referral-to-surgery timing at LRH. Across 1,427 emergency referrals in May–October 2025, time from placement on the Theatre Referral board to confirmed surgery start was captured digitally and consistently for every case – and broken down by clinical priority:

• Priority 1 – Immediate life-saving (e.g., emergency caesarean delivery, major trauma haemorrhage control): median 30 minutes
• Priority 2 – Highly urgent (e.g., acute vascular compromise, severe surgical sepsis): median 52 minutes
• Priority 3 – Urgent surgical intervention (e.g., perforated viscus, obstructed hernia): median 3.2 hours
• Priority 4 – Acute surgical workload (e.g., bowel obstruction, urgent trauma fixation): median 8.7 hours
• Priority 5 – Semi-urgent (e.g., appendicitis, fracture fixation): median 18.6 hours
• Priority 6 – Delayed emergency / trauma (predominantly orthopaedic, ~90% of P6 cases): median 40.9 hours

The urgency gradient is intact: more acute cases receive faster access. Mid-tier priorities (P4–P5) perform consistently across major services, with 84–92% of cases within target. Performance decreases in Priority 6, where high-volume orthopaedic trauma cases absorb system capacity pressure, a pattern that is now visible, quantifiable and actionable.

Before this workflow integration, these intervals required manual tracking and were difficult to aggregate for governance reporting. Emergency access is now measurable at scale, supporting prioritisation oversight and service-level governance in a way that was simply not possible under a paper-based system.

Schedule 8 reconciliation: From 0.9% to 71% digital coverage

Prior to implementation, Schedule 8 (controlled drug) medication reconciliation at LRH relied on paper registers and retrospective verification. Digital wastage records were effectively absent from system-level reporting, with digital coverage standing at just 0.9%.

Following implementation, reconciliation is captured at the point of care, embedded directly within the anaesthetic documentation workflow in Provation iPro. The results from the study period are striking:

• Digital Schedule 8 medication reconciliation coverage: 0.9% → 71%
• Total reconciliation events recorded: 6,487, each structured, timestamped and auditable at the case level

This shift does not indicate increased drug wastage. It represents a structural governance transformation: controlled substance management is now embedded in clinical workflow, timestamped, reproducible and scalable. It moves Schedule 8 medication oversight from descriptive reporting to measurable, auditable compliance, reducing risk at every level of the organisation.

“We didn’t just grow – we stabilised. The 50% reduction in month-to-month variability is the result we’re most proud of. In a clinical environment, volatility is the enemy of safety and staff satisfaction. We’ve effectively halved it.”

Joanne Lincoln
Project Coordinator, Latrobe Regional Health

Beyond the numbers: What the research means for the sector

The significance of LRH’s research study extends beyond the findings themselves. It demonstrates that a regional health service can conduct peer-quality operational research—ethics-approved, reproducible and publication-ready—using data generated through integrated digital systems as a natural byproduct of clinical workflow.

This is what genuine data-driven governance looks like: not retrospective reporting, but a continuous, system-derived audit trail that enables LRH to manage by evidence rather than anecdote.