Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) began treating patient readiness as a capacity issue after seeing how late cancellations could delay care and leave valuable OR time unfilled despite a significant surgical backlog. The challenge was finding a way to prepare patients more consistently across a large, complex surgical program without simply adding more staff.
Kristen Lund, MN, RN, Director of OR/Procedural Scheduling and the Pre-Operative Medicine Clinic at OHSU, has spent more than 13 years in perioperative leadership. In this Q&A, she discusses how OHSU introduced AI-enabled patient outreach, built human review and escalation into the process, and began moving patient preparation earlier in the surgical journey. She will share the complete story during Transform Perioperative Operations Virtual Summit on September 23, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. CT.
Question: Why did surgical patient readiness become such an important focus for OHSU?
Kristen Lund: OHSU is Oregon’s only academic health center. We perform about 38,000 surgeries annually across 53 operating rooms at four sites, with many patients receiving highly complex care. At that size and scale, getting a patient ready for surgery requires coordination across many different services and preparation pathways.
A last-minute cancellation can be devastating for the patient, especially when you consider the effort patients have already made to arrange transportation, take time off and prepare for recovery. From an operational perspective, a late cancellation that we cannot fill also represents a missed opportunity to provide care to someone in our surgical backlog. That is when readiness gaps become a burning platform for us.
Question: Where did you decide to begin improving the preparation process?
Kristen Lund: We knew what we wanted: a full schedule with patients arriving on time and prepared for surgery. Given all the variation in how patients move through preoperative preparation, we started with the one place where the vast majority of our patients intersect: the OR scheduling confirmation call. This is the final confirmation phone call from our central OR scheduling team that takes place one or two days before surgery.
That call had become very important, but it was also time intensive given the scale of our operations. One scheduler might need to contact 60 patients – patients they have never met – and walk each person through the script and identify any readiness concerns while still managing the complex work of OR scheduling. We saw an opportunity to support the team by automating the routine parts of that call while making sure staff remained involved when a patient needed more help.
Question: How did AI-enabled outreach change that final patient touchpoint?
Kristen Lund: We initially turned on an automated text message through our electronic medical record. I thought it was going to be transformative. But in actuality, only a small handful of patients confirm this text each day. That experience showed us that we needed to communicate with patients in different ways. More than ever, patients have unique communication preferences in a world of information overload, and matching patients’ needs vastly increases information retention and compliance.
We worked with LeanTaaS to launch an AI patient outreach assistant for the pre-procedure call. The AI agent is named Sasha. She clearly introduces herself to patients as an AI or computer assistant. The goal of the AI agent is to inform the patient of their arrival time, remind them of their arrival location, reiterate basic preparation instructions like NPO and hygiene, ask about signs of illness and make sure the patient has transportation needed after surgery.
The value of the agent is that it goes beyond just reading a script. Patients can ask for information to be clarified or repeated, request a call back at a specific time and share concerns that require follow-up. When that happens, the scheduling team receives the information and can step in.
Question: What principles guided OHSU’s implementation of AI in a patient-facing process?
Kristen Lund: Our challenge was not simply adopting AI. It was adopting it ethically and safely. The goal should never be to use AI for everything. We wanted to apply it where it added value while preserving the compassion, critical thinking and ethical responsibility that defines healthcare.
Safe implementation required a structured path. We worked closely with our institutional governance process and spent time getting stakeholder alignment. Privacy and security reviews were critical. We launched within a tightly defined scope, tested edge cases and established clear failure point detection before moving into live patient use.
Human review remained central throughout the process. The technology handles the routine outreach, but our staff review what patients share and follow up when needed. That distinction matters. Automation should create more time for human connection, especially for the patients who need it most.
Question: What early results have you seen from the patient outreach assistant?
Kristen Lund: The assistant has now made more than 7,000 calls, and patients have given the experience an average rating of 8.4 out of 10. We were pleased to see that level of acceptance, especially because we were not sure at the beginning how willing patients would be to engage with an AI agent or share information with it.
We also examined late cancellations related to the three reasons most directly affected by strong preoperative instructions: NPO compliance, transportation issues and patient no-shows. Those targeted cancellations declined by approximately 50%.
Just as important, the assistant gives our scheduling team more time to focus on patients who require repeated outreach, additional coordination or a more human touch. That was really what this work was about: understanding which patients can get what they need through automated outreach and where our staff’s time and expertise will make the greatest difference.
Question: How is OHSU building on what it learned from this initial work?
Kristen Lund: The final confirmation call was our last line of defense, so it made sense as a place to begin. Once that process became stable, we started looking further upstream at how to identify readiness risks earlier.
Our next phase focuses on supporting preoperative teams as they review patient and procedure information and determine the right preparation pathway. Staff currently spend significant time searching charts and pulling together information from long notes, scanned documents and outside records. We are hoping AI can help bring disparate information forward so clinicians can spend more time directly with their patients and help guide them through surgical readiness.
As we look ahead, the question is how we use these tools to provide safer, more personalized and more efficient care. The future is not about replacing the human connection; it is about using technology to strengthen it and allowing our teams to focus their expertise where it matters most.
Want to hear the full story?
Kristen Lund will share how OHSU is using coordinated case planning and thoughtfully governed AI to prepare surgical patients earlier during Transform Perioperative Operations Virtual Summit on September 23, 2026. Register here.
