Success Stories

Inova Maximizes Operating Room Time: 46% Fill Rate Drives ROI

46% released OR/Endo Time backfilled (51% for OR only)

3% Increase in prime time utilization

20% Increase in OR released minutes

Summary

Inova is an integrated health system serving Northern Virginia with five acute care facilities, operating approximately 95 licensed operating rooms (ORs) and 25 procedural rooms, making it one of the region’s largest centers for perioperative operations. Named Health System of the Year by Press Ganey in 2025 with one of the region’s only Trauma 1 centers, Inova performed 108,000 surgical and endoscopy procedures in 2024, with projections of 112,000 procedures in 2025. Their centralized scheduling team manages OR scheduling and operating room utilization improvement across all five hospitals, coordinating access for both employed and independent physician practices.

Profile

95 licensed ORs

25 procedural rooms

5 acute care facilities/hospitals

Epic EHR

Problem

As surgical demand continues to grow, Inova focused on optimizing operating room utilization, surgical throughput, and block scheduling efficiency across its enterprise.

While Inova reserved 80% of OR time for surgeon blocks, analysis revealed an opportunity to better utilize available OR capacity and improve overall operating room utilization through process improvements. The block release process, which often occurred only on the day of surgery, limited surgeons’ ability to schedule cases efficiently and reduced proactive OR block optimization. Scheduling bottlenecks arose from manual workflows, multiple communication channels (emails, calls, manual holds), and limited visibility into available OR time across facilities. The scheduling team also faced time-consuming reporting across multiple Excel spreadsheets, which slowed decision-making and made it difficult to evaluate utilization patterns effectively. These challenges created frustration among staff and surgeons, who sometimes perceived a lack of OR access despite visible openings.

By identifying these inefficiencies, Inova recognized a clear opportunity to reimagine OR scheduling and block release processes across its enterprise perioperative operations—setting the stage for a solution that would streamline workflows, improve transparency, and enhance both surgeon and staff satisfaction.

Solution

To address these identified opportunities, Inova implemented a system-wide adoption of iQueue for Operating Rooms, LeanTaaS’ AI-powered operating room optimization software, with full leadership support, restructuring block governance based on real-time scheduling data. They transitioned from location-specific to service-line specific block releases (7–21 days) and shifted from "block committees" focused on percentages to "utilization committees" emphasizing unused OR time and measurable utilization improvement. The implementation included tailored workflows for different office types, standardized data presentations across hospitals, and real-time dashboards for enterprise-wide OR scheduling visibility. On-site implementation support built relationships with physician offices, while regular huddles ensured continuous improvement.

The solution automated release and request processes, dramatically reducing phone calls and emails while improving block utilization, increasing transparency, and strengthening camaraderie between scheduling and OR teams.

LeanTaaS came with pretty much full wraparound services for implementation and beyond. We text all the time, we talk all the time, we ask questions all the time, we push for new features all the time. It's been a really rewarding partnership just in the relationships that we've formed with the group that has supported us since the beginning.

Jane Yang, MHA

Director of Operations, Perioperative Services Surgery Service Line Administration, Inova