From Operating Rooms to Procedural Rooms:How WakeMed Created 10%+ More Capacity Without New Construction

Hospitals today are facing growing pressure to meet rising procedural demand while managing through anesthesia staffing shortages, space limitations, and constrained budgets. At WakeMed Health & Hospitals in North Carolina—home to one of the nation’s busiest emergency departments—leadership had to find a way to create capacity without relying on bricks and mortar. But inconsistent on-time starts, inefficient block utilization, and manual scheduling workflows were making it hard to scale, especially across procedural areas like EP, cath lab, and endoscopy.

To address these challenges, WakeMed’s Chief Medical Officer, Charles Harr, MD, MBA, led a multidisciplinary effort to modernize scheduling and extend OR-level discipline to all anesthesia-supported procedural areas. By adopting iQueue for Operating Rooms and leveraging predictive analytics, the team gained real-time visibility into open time, improved surgeon access, and proactively rebalanced resources across the enterprise. WakeMed increased capacity by 10% across procedural areas without expanding square footage or adding staff.

In this webinar, Dr. Harr shares WakeMed’s approach to unifying OR and procedural operations—and how they’re continuing to manage demand through smarter, data-driven workflows. Join us to learn what’s worked, what’s next, and what lessons might apply in your own system.

Viewers of this webinar will be able to:

• Understand how predictive analytics and operational visibility helped WakeMed address anesthesia staffing constraints
• Explain the benefits of aligning OR and procedural areas under a unified capacity strategy
• Describe how WakeMed increased access and block utilization while improving the scheduling experience for staff and surgeons