Casechek
Streamlining Surgical Vendor Coordination with the Auto-Assign™
Replacing phone calls and sticky notes with intelligent vendor scheduling – before the surgeon walks in.
Overview
In most hospitals, coordinating vendor-supplied surgical implants looks something like this: an OR coordinator identifies the upcoming cases requiring vendor support, then manually texts or calls each sales rep – sometimes multiple times – to confirm availability, tray readiness, and timing. Case changes mean starting over. Cancellations require another round of calls. Every follow-up is invisible to everyone else in the chain.
Auto-Assign™ was built to eliminate that entire layer of manual coordination. The system connects directly to the hospital's EHR scheduling feed, automatically matches incoming cases to pre-configured vendor templates, assigns the right vendor without human intervention, and sends real-time notifications to all parties – including a mobile-first vendor app for reps in the field.
I owned the end-to-end design of the Auto-Assign™ feature: from workflow mapping and case template configuration UX, to the vendor-facing Tray App experience, to the SPD visibility dashboard that gave sterile processing teams advance notice of incoming trays. The challenge was designing across three fundamentally different user groups – hospital staff, vendor reps, and SPD technicians – each with conflicting incentives, different environments, and very different definitions of what 'ready' looks like.
Problem Space
Understanding the challenge.
Business Challenge and User Pain Points.
Business Challenge
Casechek's procurement product was already tracking loaner trays and vendor check-ins. The gap was upstream: the scheduling and confirmation workflow that determined whether the right vendor, with the right equipment, showed up at the right time. Without solving coordination, downstream tracking was just damage control. Auto-Assign™ needed to be configurable enough for complex multi-vendor procedures yet simple enough that OR coordinators – already stretched thin – would actually adopt it.
User Pain Points
OR coordinators were the load-bearing node in a coordination chain that touched vendors, surgeons, SPD, and supply chain – but they had no tools built for that role. Their workflow was entirely ad hoc: a mix of texts, phone calls, whiteboards, and institutional memory. Vendor reps, meanwhile, were navigating different processes at every hospital they serviced – no standardized check-in, no shared case view, no way to confirm readiness until they physically showed up. SPD teams found out about incoming trays when they arrived, not before, leaving no time to anticipate sterilization capacity.
Constraints
The Auto-Assign™ system had to integrate with hospital EHR scheduling feeds without requiring changes to clinical systems. Vendor adoption had to be achieved through a mobile app – not a browser portal – since reps are rarely at a desk. And the entire system had to accommodate hospitals that ranged from fully automated scheduling to semi-manual processes, without forcing a single rigid workflow on all of them.
Research
How we listened.
Key Insights
- 1OR coordinators averaged 14 vendor-related texts or calls per morning before 9 AM – most of them redundant confirmations
- 2Vendor reps at multiple hospitals described arriving and finding no record of their assignment – despite having confirmed via text the day before
- 3SPD teams were regularly blindsided by late tray deliveries because no one had shared the case schedule with them until the morning of surgery
- 4Case templates were the key design insight: most procedures follow predictable vendor patterns – encoding those patterns once eliminated the need for coordinators to make the same decisions daily
- 5Vendor app adoption depended entirely on receiving information earlier, not just more conveniently – reps needed to know about cases 26+ days out to plan inventory and travel
Strategy
Building on familiar mental models.
Reviewers already know invoices. We designed the digital experience to feel like one, then layered progressive disclosure and transparency on top. Rather than introducing a new paradigm, the interface anchored to something billing teams had used for years, reducing the learning curve and lowering the activation energy required to trust a new automated system.
Familiarity
The mental model of a paper invoice grounded the interface: layout, hierarchy, and terminology borrowed from what users already understood.
Progressive disclosure
Show the validation result first; reveal the source detail on demand. Confidence before complexity.
Transparency
Every automated decision is attributable to a data source, with plain-language explanations of what matched, what didn't, and why.
Process
How we got there.
Multi-Stakeholder Journey Mapping
Mapped the full surgical case coordination lifecycle across all three user groups simultaneously – OR coordinator, vendor rep, and SPD technician. The resulting service blueprint revealed 17 distinct handoff points between parties, most of which relied entirely on informal communication with no system of record. This artifact became the shared design foundation across product, engineering, and clinical operations.
Case Template Configuration UX
Designed the case template system – the core mechanism that makes Auto-Assign™ possible. Templates encode which vendors are needed for which procedure types, allowing the system to auto-assign without coordinator input once a matching case enters the EHR feed. Iterated through 6 rounds of low-fi testing with OR managers to balance flexibility (accommodating edge cases) with simplicity (not overwhelming coordinators with configuration options).
Vendor-Facing Tray App Redesign
Redesigned the mobile Tray App that vendor reps use to manage their case schedule, tray status, and hospital support requests. Moved from a passive notification model to an active confirmation flow – reps receive case assignments, confirm availability, and check in trays from a single screen. Designed for one-handed use in the field, with large tap targets and minimal text entry, since reps are often carrying equipment when they receive notifications.
SPD Advance Visibility Dashboard
Designed a dedicated view for sterile processing teams showing incoming vendor trays organized by case date and priority – giving SPD supervisors the advance notice they needed to plan sterilization capacity without relying on word-of-mouth from the OR. Included tray content summaries, vendor ETA flags, and exception alerts for late deliveries or incomplete documentation.
Real-Time Case Change Propagation
One of the most painful parts of manual coordination was cascading case changes: a rescheduled surgery meant manually notifying every vendor who'd been confirmed. Designed an automated change propagation system that detected EHR schedule updates and pushed notifications to all assigned vendors simultaneously – with one-tap re-confirmation or release. Reduced coordinator follow-up after case changes by eliminating the re-notification loop entirely.
Adoption Monitoring & Template Coaching
Designed an in-product adoption dashboard for hospital supply chain leads – showing Auto-Assign™ utilization rates by service line, case type, and coordinator. Surfaced which procedure types lacked templates (and therefore still required manual coordination) as prioritized coaching opportunities. University of Iowa moved 40% of cases to automated templates within 3 months, reaching 68.9% monthly automation within the first quarter.
Solution
What we built.
We shipped Auto-Assign™ – a coordination engine that connects directly to the hospital's EHR scheduling feed, automatically matches incoming cases to pre-configured vendor templates, assigns the right vendor without human intervention, and sends real-time notifications to all parties.
Surgical Case Queue
The coordination dashboard organizes all upcoming cases by status – For Review, Assigned, Canceled – giving OR coordinators a single source of truth that replaced whiteboards, spreadsheets, and ad-hoc text threads.
Auto-Assign™ Engine Running
One click triggers the engine across all matchable cases. Each case is read from the EHR feed, matched to a vendor template, assigned, and confirmed – live – with toast notifications to vendors and SPD firing in real time.
Vendor Assignment & Templates
For cases without a template, coordinators assign manually and save the configuration as a new Auto-Assign™ rule. Each manual assignment makes the system smarter – encoding institutional knowledge into the engine one case at a time.
Case Calendar View
The calendar gives coordinators a monthly picture of surgical volume by vendor. SPD teams see incoming trays days in advance; supply chain leads can spot coverage gaps before they become day-of surprises.
Experience the Prototype
Experience Surgical Vendor Coordination with Auto-Assign™.
This case study highlighted the strategy, research, and key design decisions behind Auto-Assign™. Explore the interactive prototype to experience the complete coordination workflow firsthand.
Prototype Highlights
- 01Surgical Case Queue
- 02Auto-Assign™ Engine
- 03Vendor Assignment & Templates
- 04Case Calendar View
Launch the Prototype
Password Protected
Impact
Business outcomes across the enterprise.
End-to-end case processing time from case creation through vendor acceptance reduced by 79.7% – eliminating the manual coordination loop that consumed coordinator mornings.
Vendors confirmed and scheduled an average of 26.8 days earlier than without Auto-Assign™ – giving reps time to plan inventory and hospitals confidence in case readiness.
OR coordinators saved 2+ hours per day previously spent chasing vendors by phone and text – time redirected to patient care coordination and higher-value case preparation.
University of Iowa reached 68.9% monthly Auto-Assign™ utilization within one quarter – with vendors pre-assigned automatically before OR staff arrived for next-day procedures.
“Before Casechek, I would send multiple texts and place multiple calls informing vendors about upcoming cases, case changes, cancellations. A very time consuming and tedious process. Now with Casechek, a couple clicks of a mouse and I'm done. I've saved hours upon hours of time.
Reflection
What I learned.
Designing for operating rooms means designing under conditions of genuine urgency. A delayed vendor confirmation isn't an inconvenience – it can push a surgery, expose a patient to risk, or cost a hospital tens of thousands of dollars in OR time. What surprised me most was how little of the coordination problem was actually about information. Everyone knew what cases were coming. The problem was that no one had agreed on whose job it was to communicate that information, in what format, to whom, and by when. Auto-Assign™ didn't just automate a task – it settled a long-standing ambiguity about accountability. Once the system made it clear that coordination was the platform's job, not any individual's job, the resistance to adoption largely disappeared. That was the real design insight: the most valuable thing we could do wasn't build a better notification. It was build a system everyone could point to and say, 'that's responsible for this.' Clarity of ownership, expressed in product design, turned out to be more valuable than any feature.