The OR Day, Personalized for Every Physician with the Apella Mobile App

If you think back to the last time you took a flight, you almost certainly used an airline app to help plan the timing of your day: When should you leave for the airport? Did your gate change? Is the flight delayed? When does boarding start?

But your airline app didn’t make you scan every flight in the airport. It showed you only your flight information: your gate, your boarding time, your flight status, the updates that mattered to your trip. That is what makes it useful: the experience is real-time, context-relevant, and personalized. 

Surgeons and anesthesiologists moving through the OR day need the same experience. Not just for convenience, but to help them use their time more effectively and stay coordinated as the day changes.

Today, we're introducing the Apella mobile app, a new way for physicians to stay connected to their ORs in real time, with a personalized view of their rooms, their cases, and what they need to know next. It helps them plan their day better, stay informed, and know exactly when and where they’re needed.

How much time do I have before the next case?

Between surgical cases, many physicians are constantly doing mental math. A surgeon steps out of one case and has to decide what the stretch of time before their next surgery can realistically hold. Is there enough time to check in with a patient? Speak with family? Step away for lunch? Or is the next room moving quickly enough that they should stay close? An anesthesiologist has to make similar calculations across several rooms at once.

A board showing the EHR schedule cannot answer the questions that inform a physician’s series of decisions and tradeoffs. It reflects the plan for the day, not the reality of how the day is unfolding now.

Within the Apella mobile app, Case Tracker gives physicians a real-time view of case progress, current case status, and continuously updated predictions for upcoming case timing. And because those updates are built on events Apella detects in the room, physicians can understand how far along the current case is and when the next patient is likely to be ready.

For physicians, that means they can use the time between cases more deliberately, adjust sooner when the schedule changes, and feel more in control of where they need to be next.

Learn how AI mobile notifications increased physician trust and reduced delays.
Read the full analysis

What’s actually happening in my room?

Once physicians know when the next case is expected to start, they often need a clearer sense of what is happening in the room itself. How far along is the turnover? Is the room nearly ready? Has the patient arrived? Are they awake? Are they draped?

Today, answering those questions often means waiting for an update from a nurse or resident, calling the desk, or making a best guess. When that update comes too early, too late, or not at all, physicians can arrive before the room is ready and waste valuable time — or arrive too late and contribute to delays that ripple through the rest of the day.

Live View gives physicians a way to check on their rooms at any time, without relying on secondhand updates that may be delayed or incomplete. They can see room status, patient readiness, turnover progress, and phase of care, including surgery prep, active procedure, wrap-up, and turnover — all with built-in patient privacy protections.

Instead of waiting for someone else to relay what is happening, physicians can quickly see where the room stands and make their next decision with more confidence.

Is it time to move?

For physicians, the highest-value update is often the simplest one: a just-in-time notification of when it is time to head to the room.

Some mobile EHR experiences can send physician notifications. But those updates often sit alongside everything else: lab results, chart activity, clinic-related messages, and other alerts that may matter clinically, but do not help a surgeon or anesthesiologist decide where they need to be right now. Even when the relevant update is there, the physician still has to open the app, find it, and separate it from the rest. 

Over time, the signal gets harder to recognize, and the updates that matter can get ignored with the ones that do not.

Apella Live Activities are real-time case notifications that stay persistently visible on the physician’s phone lock screen. Just like an airline app keeps your boarding countdown or flight status visible and top-of-queue, Apella Live Activities keep clear and persistent the OR updates that matter most: what has changed, what comes next, and when it is time to move.

For surgeons, that means fewer surprises between cases and easier-to-time arrivals. For anesthesiologists, it means staying aware across multiple fluid assignments without another dashboard to monitor.

When a physician is deciding whether to make a move, the latest case update is already there at a glance.

Mobile updates that physicians already trust

This kind of mobile experience only works if physicians can truly rely on the updates it delivers. That trust starts with the data: Apella’s updates are rooted in the type of ground-truth data and ambient intelligence required for trustworthy predictions, not manual documentation.

Across hospital sites, 92% of physicians rated Apella’s mobile notifications useful or very useful, with consistent results across both academic medical centers and community hospitals. 

Physicians describe replacing manual texts or calls that weren't always reliable with Apella’s notifications to determine when to head to the OR and for planning across a full surgical day. When they get reliable, real-time visibility into perioperative milestones on the devices they already carry, surgeons and anesthesiologists don't ignore it. They build it into how they run their day.

Learn how AI mobile notifications increased physician trust and reduced delays.
Read the full analysis

Not more information. The right information.

Apella’s mobile app isn't about giving physicians another dashboard to check or another stream of alerts to manage. It's about helping them stay oriented to the day as it changes, without having to go looking for the latest update.

The OR day is no longer one shared board physicians have to scan. With Apella Mobile, it becomes personal: their rooms, their cases, their next move.