Healthcare systems across Europe face a challenge that increasingly feels like mission impossible: deliver more care, reduce waiting lists and boost productivity, all while operating with tight budgets and an overstretched workforce. At the same time, demand continues to rise. Populations are ageing, patients live longer with multiple chronic conditions, and treatment options grow more complex and more resource‑intensive every year. As expectations increase faster than capacity can grow, the gap between what is asked of hospitals and what feels achievable becomes wider. Yet the need to create additional capacity remains undeniable, it simply has to be found. That requires looking closely at where potential may still be hiding in everyday practice: unwarranted variation, longer‑than‑necessary stays, outdated routines or bottlenecks that have gradually become normal parts of the pathway, but that don’t contribute to the quality of the care.
But here is the paradox every operational leader recognises: if everyone is already working flat out, where is this hidden productivity supposed to come from? Teams feel stretched, wards feel full, and service lines feel like they are permanently in “winter mode.” Working harder isn’t an option. Working with less certainly isn’t either.
So perhaps the answer isn’t about pushing harder, but about seeing more clearly.
When hospitals work with integrated planning and accurate costing, care becomes measurable, consistent and comparable. Pathways that feel unique suddenly fit into wider patterns. Variation that was invisible becomes quantifiable. And with benchmarking, organisations can finally see where performance diverges from peers, and what closing that gap might unlock.
That is where one of our recent exercises began. Using LOGEX’s integrated costing and benchmarking capabilities, a UK-based hospital asked us a straightforward question: “Where could we find more capacity without working harder or spending more?” Benchmarking revealed the answer. Among their most resource-intensive pathways, elective hip surgery showed a clear, measurable variation in length of stay compared with best-performing peers, variation large enough to translate into thousands of bed days.
When we modelled what closing that gap would mean, the result was striking: around 15,000 bed days per year, equivalent to 40 beds per night.
The case study below walks through how that opportunity was identified, validated and translated into a practical improvement plan, and why this approach can be replicated across many other high-impact pathways.
About our customer’s challenge
The hospital had been searching for realistic ways to increase capacity, but like many organisations, they struggled to pinpoint where meaningful improvement could come from. They were already operating with tight resources and had little room to “work harder.”
What they did have, however, was a strong analytical foundation: integrated costing and planning tools that provided consistent, comparable data. This meant benchmarking could be applied effectively as a practical way to uncover variation that was genuinely actionable.
About our process
Using the hospital’s activity and costing data, we analysed the ten procedure groups with the greatest variation relative to peer performance. These top-ten areas usually reveal the clearest operational gains.
Within this set, elective hip surgery emerged as a standout candidate:
We then examined where in the pathway this variation occurred and modelled what reducing it would mean for beds, activity and overall pathway performance. Because the hospital already worked with integrated planning, this insight could be directly linked to operational feasibility, including workforce capacity and the knock-on financial implications.
About the impact
The LOGEX professional benchmark revealed that, across the top ten procedure groups with the greatest difference from peer performance, there was potential to free up as many as 15,000 bed days annually, equivalent to roughly 40 beds per day.
Crucially, the impact goes beyond raw capacity. Bringing workforce and finance into the analysis revealed how this improvement would play out in practice:
Workforce:
Shorter, more predictable stays reduce day-to-day pressure on wards. This creates room for staff to focus on planned activity instead of firefighting flow issues. It also helps hospitals rely less on temporary staffing because beds become available more consistently.
Finance:
Treating more patients with existing resources improves cost effectiveness per case. Because the estate and core workforce are already funded, any gain in throughput translates into better productivity without additional budget.
Operational outcomes:
More available beds mean more elective activity, shorter waits and better flow through the organisation, all achieved within the hospital’s existing footprint.
In other words: this isn’t only about efficiency, but about creating genuinely deliverable capacity that strengthens the entire pathway.
After understanding the impact of this fairly simple process, we should consider this: hip surgery is just one example. Similar variation exists in other resource-intensive pathways such as knee replacements, spinal procedures, abdominal surgery and cardiology interventions.
Imagine if every hospital carried out the same benchmarking exercise across their top ten high-variation procedures. How much capacity could be made available across a region or country? How quickly could waiting lists shrink if every hospital found even one pathway with a 5–10-bed-per-day opportunity?
The potential is far larger than one pathway, one hospital or one case study. This is about a method, one that can be repeated, scaled and embedded into productivity recovery efforts across healthcare systems.