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Right Case, Right Place: Optimizing OR Scheduling Across Multiple Hospitals with AI for a 16% Increase in Staffed Room Utilization and 1,600 Incremental Cases

Speakers

Copy of Chris Hunt-Multicare (1)
Chris Hunt, MBA, MSHA, BSN, RN, CSSM, NEA-BC
Associate Vice President, Perioperative Services MultiCare Health System
Copy of Dr. Hart
Wesley Hart, MD
Anesthesiologist, MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital

Summary

Hospital leaders are increasingly focused on ensuring the “right case in the right place” as they seek to enhance operational efficiency across multiple facilities. Multi-hospital systems face the complex challenge of coordinating surgical demand with operating room (OR) capacity while managing resources effectively. The reliance on outdated, manual block management processes exacerbates these challenges, limiting the ability to optimize OR time and improve patient outcomes.

Join Dr. Wesley Hart, MD, Anesthesiologist at MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital, and Chris Hunt, Associate Vice President at MultiCare, as they discuss how MultiCare Health System has leveraged AI to optimize OR scheduling. This presentation will explore how the right technological tools are ensuring the right cases are placed in the right ORs across multiple hospitals, leading to improved resource utilization, surgeon engagement, and system-wide standardization.

Learn how MultiCare’s proactive, data-driven approach to block management and regional scheduling structures has transformed operational decision-making and how these successes can be replicated across other health systems.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Understand the Role of AI in OR Optimization
    Participants will learn how AI-driven tools can be used to match surgical demand with OR capacity, ensuring that the “right case is in the right place” across multiple hospitals within a health system.
  2. Identify Strategies for System-Wide Standardization and Efficiency
    Attendees will explore how MultiCare Health System has implemented proactive, data-driven approaches to OR block management and scheduling that have led to increased standardization and operational efficiency across their facilities.
  3. Examine the Replication of Success Across Health Systems
    Participants will gain insight into how the scheduling model used at MultiCare can be replicated across different hospital systems, improving OR utilization, surgeon engagement, and overall patient outcomes.
  4. Learn About the Integration of Regional Scheduling Structures
    Attendees will understand the benefits of a coordinated, regional scheduling structure that supports multi-hospital systems, ensuring consistent and efficient use of OR resources.

Related resources

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Chapter 1: The Looming Challenge

If you work in the healthcare industry, or even if you’re just an interested observer, you don’t need a book to tell you that the financial pressure is on as never before. A perfect storm of circumstances is swirling together, one that will make survivability, not to mention profitability, a greater challenge for healthcare companies than we’ve seen in the modern era.

As with banks, retailers, and airlines, which had to rapidly enhance their brick-and-mortar footprints with robust online business models—it is the early movers eager to gain new efficiencies that will thrive and gain market share. The slow-to-move and the inefficient will end up being consolidated into larger health systems seeking to expand their geographical footprints.

The pressures on healthcare

Let’s look at just a few of the looming challenges healthcare must meet head-on.

An aging population

By the year 2030, the number of adults sixty-five years of age or older will exceed the number of children eighteen years or younger in the United States. We are living longer than our parents did. Positive news for sure, but problematic for several reasons.

The older we get, the more medical help we need. Older people have more chronic diseases. By 2025, nearly 50 percent of the population will suffer from one or more chronic diseases that will require ongoing medical intervention. This combination of an aging population and an increase in chronic diseases will create a ballooning demand for healthcare services.

Read more