The smartest move perioperative teams made this year rarely shows up as a single tool or technology purchase. Look closer at the specifics — an integrated operating model that puts surgery, anesthesia, nursing, and frontline staff around the same data and the same accountability structure; a weekly capacity huddle that catches resource conflicts before they become delays; standardized handoffs that replace individual problem-solving with shared processes — and a pattern emerges. None of it is about pushing people to work harder. All of it is about redesigning how the work itself flows: removing friction, clarifying ownership, and making information visible to the people actually doing the job, not just the leaders above them.
That pattern plays out in very different projects depending on the organization: an AI-enabled black box that captures OR safety data without threatening blame, a predictive scheduling algorithm that routes patients to the right surgical venue, a real-time platform that tracks every phase of a procedure on one shared dashboard. But underneath the variety is the same bet — that transparency and better coordination, not more pressure on frontline staff, is what actually moves the needle on safety, throughput, and burnout all at once. Becker’s asked perioperative leaders across health systems large and small the smartest thing their team did this year for better results. Their answers, below.
The leaders featured below are speaking at Becker’s Perioperative Summit, set for Sept. 14-15 at the Hilton Chicago.
If you would like to join the event as a speaker, please contact Scott King at sking@beckershealthcare.com.
As part of an ongoing series, Becker’s is connecting with healthcare leaders who will speak at the event to get their perspectives on key issues in the industry.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What is the smartest thing your team did in the last year for better results?
M. Trevor Bennett, MSN, RN. Chief Administrative Officer for UC San Diego Health: The smartest thing we did was stop trying to solve every problem individually and instead build a system for how we solve problems together. We created an integrated perioperative operating model that brings surgery, anesthesia, nursing, operations, and frontline teams around the same data, the same priorities, and the same accountability structure. Just as importantly, we strengthened shared governance and pushed decision-making closer to the people doing the work every day. The result is greater transparency, faster escalation of barriers, and a culture shifting from “who owns this problem?” to “how do we solve it together?”
Michael Guertin, MD. Chief Perioperative Medical Director of Faculty Leadership Institute; Director and Clinical Anesthesiology Professor for The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus, Ohio): At The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, we worked with Surgical Safety Technologies to install OR Black Box into 10 ORs as a starting point for broader implementation. This system uses advanced AI algorithms and human review to identify safety trends, workflow patterns and opportunities to elevate high-reliability care by highlighting teamwork and strengthening the systems that support safe surgery for every patient, every time. A very important part of this new program is emphasis with the surgical teams that the focus is not on individual performance and will not be used for disciplinary action or blame. All data is encrypted, de-identified when returned and overseen by a multidisciplinary governance committee that will look to identify team performance and operational issues which strengthen our commitment to proactive safety, teamwork and continuous learning across perioperative services.
Another important improvement project has been a reorganization of our preoperative assessment center, along with an expansion of the advanced practice provider staffing in that center, which has led to a significant increase in access and throughput to very effectively prepare patients for surgery while managing the system cost for that important perioperative process.
Jan Weidner, MSN, RN. Associate Chief Nursing Officer for CHRISTUS St. Vincent (Santa Fe, N.M.): One of the smartest things we did this past year was shift our leadership mindset from asking, “How do we get people to work faster?” to asking, “How do we make the work flow better?” In healthcare, sustainable performance improvement does not come from pushing nurses, surgical technologists, or support staff to do more with less. It comes from systematically removing barriers, reducing wasted effort, and creating workflows that allow caregivers to spend more time focused on patients rather than navigating inefficiencies.
We recognized that small amounts of recovered time, when multiplied across dozens of team members and hundreds of surgical cases, can have a significant impact on capacity, patient access, staff engagement, and overall operational performance. Rather than pursuing efficiency initiatives that risk burnout, we focused on improving coordination, communication and proactive planning.
To support this approach, we implemented a weekly surgical services capacity huddle that brings together key stakeholders across the perioperative continuum, including surgical services leadership, frontline supervisors, sterile processing leadership, anesthesia leadership, surgical schedulers, radiology and other ancillary support departments. This multidisciplinary forum provides a structured opportunity to look ahead at the upcoming week, identify capacity constraints, anticipate resource needs, and address workflow barriers before they impact patient care.
The huddle has improved our ability to align staffing, equipment, instrument availability, procedural scheduling and support services around anticipated demand. It has also strengthened collaboration across departments, allowing decisions to be made in real time rather than reacting to issues after they occur. In addition, the process has reinforced disciplined application of our block release principles, helping us maximize operating room utilization, increase access for surgeons and patients, and ensure that available surgical capacity is used effectively.
Perhaps most importantly, this approach has fostered a culture of shared accountability and systems thinking. Instead of viewing challenges as individual performance issues, teams work together to improve the processes that drive results. By focusing on workflow optimization rather than work acceleration, we have been able to improve operational performance while supporting staff well-being, engagement, and long-term sustainability.
In short, our smartest decision was creating a proactive, multidisciplinary capacity management process that improves workflow, optimizes resources and enables our teams to deliver better results without increasing burnout.
Jarrett Heard, MD. Medical Director of Ambulatory Perioperative Services and Director of Executive Leadership and Business for The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus, Ohio): At The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, creating surgical pavilion venue designation (inpatient vs. outpatient — A, B, C, D) and using our preoperative nurses, APPs, and physicians to reconcile/recommend accurate surgical pavilion scheduling and the creation of our predictive algorithm in the EHR to accurately schedule a virtual or in-person preoperative visit has allowed us to screen and optimize patients more efficiently/expeditiously and successfully direct patients to the correct surgical pavilion which dramatically improved our outpatient operations and growth. Outperforming our budgeted cases last fiscal year was directly attributed to the growth in outpatient volume.
Stephen Estime, MD. Associate Chair of Anesthesiology and Critical Care for UChicago Medicine (Chicago): What counts as smart is often only clear in hindsight. What we can say is that a strategic investment in scheduling and compensation infrastructure, one that was deliberate, but whose full benefits weren’t immediately obvious, has paid off in ways we didn’t fully anticipate. What started as a way to bring more structure and accuracy to faculty scheduling and compensation has since expanded to cover all of our faculty, trainees and contract clinicians. The benefits became clearer as the system matured. What we’ve gained is accuracy in the underlying data, transparency across the department on how time and work are being tracked, and a meaningful reduction in the manual processes that used to consume time and create errors and inefficiency. The infrastructure has outlasted the initial problem it was built to solve, which is probably the best outcome you can hope for. A strong foundation is the substrate for growth, and that is exactly what positions us well going forward.
Aubrey Pepper, DNP, MSN. Senior Director of Nursing Surgical Services for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis, Tenn.): One of the smartest things our team did this year was get more consistent in how we work and communicate across departments instead of trying to solve problems on our own. We improved how teams hand off work, built stronger partnerships across perioperative, radiology, and procedural areas, and used data more often to guide our decisions. Having clearer processes and accountability helped improve patient safety, reliability, teamwork, and overall performance. The biggest takeaway for me is that lasting results didn’t come from one big initiative, but rather from creating better ways for our teams to work together every day.
Mary Anne Douglas, RN. Associate Vice President of Nursing Practice Excellence, Surgical Services for Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): No. 1. Standardize our safety approach harmonizing eight additional facilities into our existing 25 facilities in regards to our Safety protocols. Instead of just implementing the former standard, we worked with a representative task force and refreshed our processes with input from our teams, especially our new teams who had a fresh perspective. The resulting product was implemented in April 2026 amongst our 33 facilities and we are driving closer to zero harm than we ever have. Included in this is a record of over 1,300,000 cases without a retained sponge, decreased wrong site surgeries and zero wrong patient and wrong procedures year to date (knock on wood). We recognize our teams who enhanced and refreshed our safety processes and whose engagement helped drive a strong procedure thru excellent participation.
No. 2. Continuing work to train our own surgical technologists through our internal program thus our turnover rate in two regions is less than 1% and our vacancies are filled. We have had zero travelers so far this year. Key to safety and efficiency strategies is a stable workforce and we have been able to realize this in the past year.
Bipan Chand, MD. Chair of Department of Surgery for St. Joseph Medical Center (Joliet, Ill.): The smartest thing our team did this past year was implement HealthNautica across our perioperative space to bring real-time visibility to procedural efficiency and quality. Rather than relying on retrospective chart reviews and manual tracking, we now capture standardized data on all three phases of any procedure. I call it the three “Ps.” Preoperative (prehospital), perioperative (in the facility) and postoperative (hospital or home). With this platform we focus on case flow and readiness (in the pre-hospital phase), key workflow events (in the perioperative phase), and quality metrics (in-facility and once discharged). All of this resides in one platform that the whole team can see.
Making these metrics transparent and actionable shifted the culture from anecdote-driven to data-driven decision-making, and it gave our frontline staff — not just leadership — ownership of the numbers they influence every day. The result has been measurable gains in throughput and consistency without sacrificing safety, and it has become the backbone of how we identify and close performance gaps. The biggest lesson: the technology matters, but the real win came from pairing it with a disciplined operational cadence and a team willing to hold itself accountable to the data.
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