Surgical access often looks like a scheduling challenge — but at scale, it’s a strategic growth lever.
Take Lee Health, where fragmented systems, rigid block schedules and manual coordination created the illusion of constrained capacity, even when usable OR time sat open across the enterprise. Rather than expand its physical footprint, the health system began treating OR access as a shared, enterprisewide asset and aligned teams around a single operating model. With data transparency, surgeon accountability and structured decision-making, the system drove measurable change: +11% case volume, +6% block utilization, -20% unused block minutes and 8.8x ROI.
Lis Digneo, MHA, RN, system director of outpatient surgical services at Lee Health, shares how the organization moved from reactive, siloed workflows to a coordinated model built on visibility, governance and automation — and how other health systems can grow by orchestrating the capacity they already have.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How governance and accountability sustain behavior change beyond dashboards
- The most common barriers to OR utilization: fragmentation, rigidity and manual coordination
- How to build credible, shared data with AI to align surgeons, schedulers and leadership
- Practical ways to unlock existing capacity, raise utilization and drive ROI without new infrastructure