Automated booking system to reduce hospital staff’s administrative workload

18 March, 2026

In an increasingly technological and specialised hospital system, a number of different IT systems are required to create a single, coherent patient pathway.

Unfortunately, these systems do not always communicate with each other. As a result, doctors and healthcare administrative staff often have to check multiple times during the same patient pathway whether, for example, the result of an X-ray examination has arrived before the patient’s consultation with the doctor.

Automated coordination saves time

In order to keep patient pathways as short as possible, patients are sometimes scheduled for a consultation based on an expectation of when examination results will be available. Unfortunately, this can lead to situations where patients arrive at the hospital for an appointment only to be sent home again because, without test results, the doctor has no new information to share.

- It may sound strange, but unfortunately that is the reality. Fundamentally changing the system would be a long and exhausting process, which is why we came up with the idea of creating a kind of digital pathway coordinator that retrieves data from the various systems and sends it to us, instead of us having to remember to check manually at regular intervals, explains Senior Consultant Kenneth Pedersen, Department of Medical Gastroenterology, Odense University Hospital.

The system has been tested and it works

And it works. The system, called FlowPriority, sends notifications when test results or scans are ready, after which patients are immediately booked for a consultation.

Over a five-month test period in the liver cancer outpatient clinic at Odense University Hospital, the healthcare administrative staff saved 5–7 hours per week, while doctors saved 2–4 hours per week. At the same time, fewer patient consultations were cancelled.

The team of researchers from OUH and SDU (the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute, CAI-X, as well as the Departments of Medical Gastroenterology S and Endocrinology M at OUH) now hopes to scale the solution.

Initially, this will be done by further developing the system and testing it in another hospital department. The FlowPriority project has received DKK 400,000 from MedTech Odense’s CONCEPT fund for this purpose.