Due to a variety of factors, many health systems across the country had to make operational changes in 2025. Becker’s asked three healthcare strategic leaders which operational change made the biggest impact re. patients in the past year and what they learned from it.
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Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What operational change your organization made in the last year had the biggest impact on patient flow or capacity, and what did you learn from it?
Vicente A. Resto, MD, PhD. Chief Operating Officer for the Faculty Group Practice, Senior Vice President for Health System Ambulatory Operations and Surgical Services, Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, UTMB Health (Galveston, TX): In the ambulatory setting, operational analytics has allowed us to identify important areas of opportunity such as our capacity use in our clinics. This information has led us to redesign our scheduling templates and our supporting processes with resulting improvement in access to services.
Similarly, in the inpatient setting we have been able to apply an analytics-based approach with resulting improvement in observation admissions and procedural area utilization. These are examples that underscore the need to understand actual performance as an important way to improve operational design as well as to support implementation.
Tyler Strapp. Chief Operating Officer, Pineville Community Health Center (Pineville, KY): Over the past year, the most transformative operational change at our organization has been the digitalization and restructuring of our intake, care coordination, and care delivery model. As a rural, independent health system, we operate with limited resources and highly interdependent teams, which makes efficiency and communication mission critical.
By centralizing scheduling, standardizing patient assessment workflows, and integrating communication tools such as I-PASS and Tiger Connect, we created a more connected and predictable care environment. These changes improved care transitions, reduced delays in patient access, and expanded our capacity without additional staffing or infrastructure.
The most important lesson we learned is that digital transformation is not just a technology initiative; it is an alignment initiative. When workflows are standardized, communication is reliable, and technology supports rather than complicates daily operations, teams perform with greater consistency, and patients experience safer, more coordinated care.
Alan Kumar. Chief Operating Officer, Powers Health (Munster, IN): At Powers Health, improving patient access is one of our key strategic priorities. A recent successful initiative was partnering with our clinicians for a deep dive into their clinic schedules.
We streamlined/automated their schedule templates within our enterprise EMR while keeping the customizations our providers requested. This resulted in a 4-11% increase in available appointments, depending on the type of practice, without adding any FTEs or installing expensive new software.
Dane Peterson. Chief Operating Officer, Children’s Health (Dallas, TX): The operational change that had the biggest impact on patient flow and capacity management across our health system in the past year was fully implementing Epic’s Grand Central work processes across the enterprise. Over the past year, we worked together to implement a consolidated access center and bed management team that works collaboratively with our two hospitals. With the goal of Right Patient, Right Resources and Right Bed, we have improved our efficiency of inter and intra-facility transfers and improved throughput. Aligned with a capacity expansion at our Plano Hospital, these new processes resulted in zero denied transfers due to bed constraints in the past quarter.
