Epic OpTime is Epic’s perioperative application for surgical and procedural care. It brings case scheduling, preoperative readiness, intraoperative documentation, supplies and implants, status tracking, charges, and reporting into a connected workflow for operating rooms and ambulatory surgery settings.
OpTime is often used alongside Epic Anesthesia and other Epic clinical and revenue cycle applications. The exact workflows available to users depend on the organization’s licensed products, configuration, facilities, and perioperative operating model.
What Does Epic OpTime Do?
OpTime follows the surgical encounter from the first case request through scheduling, preparation, the procedure, recovery, charging, and reporting.
Common OpTime workflows include:
- Surgical case requests
- Operating room and procedure scheduling
- Resource and conflict checking
- Preoperative documentation and readiness
- Preference cards
- Intraoperative nursing documentation
- Surgical counts and case events
- Supplies and implant documentation
- Patient and case status tracking
- Procedure charges
- Operational reporting and analytics
OpTime does not dictate how an operating room should run. Each health system configures it around approved clinical practices, staffing models, facilities, service lines, documentation requirements, and governance decisions.
Surgical Scheduling and Case Readiness
An open operating room does not mean a case is ready to schedule. Teams may still need to coordinate the surgeon, anesthesia coverage, nursing and technical staff, equipment, implants, supplies, expected procedure time, patient readiness, and facility-specific rules.
OpTime can support centralized visibility into cases and resources while helping teams identify potential conflicts. The effectiveness of the schedule still depends on data quality, realistic procedure durations, maintained rules, clear ownership, and timely updates from clinical and operational teams.
Preoperative workflows may track documentation, testing, orders, authorizations, clearances, and other requirements. The organization needs a clear answer for three questions: What is required, who owns it, and what happens when it is still unresolved before surgery?
Intraoperative Documentation
During the procedure, perioperative staff may use OpTime to document events, participants, times, assessments, positioning, counts, specimens, equipment, supplies, implants, and other elements of the intraoperative record.
Documentation should be designed around clinical workflow and regulatory requirements. Excessive or poorly organized build can increase clicks and create inconsistent records, while missing elements can affect patient care, reporting, charging, or compliance.
Health systems should involve perioperative clinicians in workflow design, testing, training, and ongoing optimization.
Preference Cards, Supplies, and Implants
Preference cards help teams prepare the instruments, supplies, equipment, and setup required for a procedure or surgeon. Accurate, well-maintained cards make preparation easier. Outdated or duplicated cards lead to waste, delays, and understandable frustration for staff.
An effective preference-card program includes:
- Defined ownership and approval
- Standard naming and organization
- Scheduled review
- Usage and variance analysis
- Coordination with supply-chain data
- Processes for additions, substitutions, and retirements
Supply and implant workflows also require consistent item data, barcode processes, interface testing, charge rules, and reconciliation procedures.
OpTime and Epic Anesthesia
OpTime is commonly implemented with Epic Anesthesia to support connected perioperative and anesthesia workflows. The applications serve different documentation needs but share information across the surgical encounter.
Implementation teams need to test the full workflow, not each application in isolation. A case change can affect documentation, medications, devices, charges, status events, and several groups of users at once.
Charges, Reporting, and Operating Room Performance
Perioperative data informs charging, operational reporting, quality review, and capacity planning. Teams often monitor measures such as:
- First-case on-time starts
- Room utilization
- Turnover time
- Case duration accuracy
- Cancellation and delay reasons
- Block utilization
- Preference-card accuracy
- Supply or implant variance
- Documentation completion
- Charge reconciliation
Metric definitions should be governed. Teams must agree on which timestamps and cases are included, who owns the measure, and how it will be used. A dashboard cannot improve performance unless operational leaders can interpret and act on the information.
Epic OpTime Implementation Considerations
A thoughtful implementation or expansion covers:
- Perioperative governance and decision rights
- Facility, room, service, and procedure design
- Scheduling rules and resource requirements
- Preference-card conversion and cleanup
- Supply, implant, and device workflows
- Integration with anesthesia, laboratory, imaging, pathology, pharmacy, and billing
- Status boards and patient-flow communication
- Role-based security
- End-to-end testing
- Training for each perioperative role
- Cutover and downtime planning
- Post-live support and optimization
Copying every legacy workflow brings old problems into the new system. At the other extreme, unnecessary customization creates a lasting maintenance burden. The better target is a supportable design that meets clinical, operational, and regulatory requirements.
Epic OpTime Jobs and Skills
Common roles supporting OpTime include:
- Epic OpTime analyst
- Perioperative informaticist
- Epic Anesthesia analyst
- Application or solution architect
- Interface analyst
- Reporting analyst
- Testing lead
- Project manager
- Instructional designer or trainer
- Go-live and application support specialist
Employers may look for perioperative workflow knowledge, relevant Epic certification, implementation or optimization experience, testing, reporting, training, and the ability to work with clinical and operational stakeholders.
Frequently Asked Questions About Epic OpTime
Is Epic OpTime an operating room scheduling system?
Scheduling is an important part of OpTime, but the application also supports preoperative readiness, intraoperative documentation, preference cards, supplies, implants, case tracking, charges, and reporting.
What is the difference between Epic OpTime and Epic Anesthesia?
OpTime supports perioperative and operating room workflows, while Epic Anesthesia supports anesthesia-specific documentation and workflows. The applications are often used together.
Can OpTime be used in ambulatory surgery centers?
OpTime can support hospital and ambulatory procedural settings when it is licensed and configured for the organization’s facilities and workflows.
What makes an OpTime implementation difficult?
Common challenges include complex scheduling rules, preference-card quality, supply and implant data, device and application integrations, role-specific documentation, testing, training, and coordination across many clinical and operational groups.
How can an organization optimize OpTime after go-live?
Optimization may include workflow observation, preference-card governance, scheduling analysis, documentation review, reporting improvements, charge reconciliation, upgrade readiness, and reduction of manual workarounds.
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