Increasing ARR by $440K after Adding One Button

Feb 10, 2026

My client builds a robotic system that assists with a specialized medical procedure. Before each procedure, a clinical engineer must prepare the machine by pulling up the patient’s previously annotated documents from an earlier session.

This preparation happens inside the operating room, under real time pressure.

Research Method

To understand the workflow, I conducted a contextual inquiry, auditing the user experience by going on-site and observing clinical engineers during live procedures. I watched how preparation actually happened—not how it was documented or assumed to work.

This is where the problem surfaced.

The Existing Workflow

For every procedure, the clinical engineer had to:

  1. Arrive in the operating room

  2. Check personal notes to confirm which patient was scheduled

  3. Search for that patient on the machine’s interface

  4. Manually re-enter patient information from those notes

  5. Load data from the patient’s previous appointment

Total time taken: ~4 minutes

Important detail: All of the data being searched for and re-entered was already known or could easily be known by the system earlier in the workflow.

The Insight

Patient creation already required a procedure to exist. Procedure dates were already known at scheduling time. Previous appointment data already existed.

Yet none of this information was connected.

The system was forcing clinical engineers to reconstruct known data—inside the OR.

The Recommendation

I proposed a small but structural change:

  • Make procedure date a mandatory field during patient creation

  • Associate patients automatically to their scheduled procedure date

  • Add a “Today’s Patients” button on the machine interface

  • Pre-fill all previously known patient data

Result: Instead of searching and typing, the clinical engineer clicks once and selects the patient scheduled for that day.

The Outcome

  • 4 minutes saved per procedure

  • ~30 minutes saved per day

  • Enough recovered time to schedule one additional procedure per day

Estimated annual revenue increase: ~$440K

Why This Matters

No redesign. No new features. No training.

Just removing friction from a critical workflow by aligning the system with how work actually happens.

This is the kind of leverage you get when product decisions are grounded in real-world observation—not assumptions.