Faced with rising surgical demand and limited operating room capacity, Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System turned to AI-powered strategies to achieve a 16% increase in staffed room utilization, allowing the team to perform 1,600 additional surgical cases.

During a recent webinar hosted by Becker’s Healthcare and LeanTaaS, Wesley Hart, MD, anesthesiologist at MultiCare’s Tacoma General Hospital, and Chris Hunt, MBA, MSHA, BSN, RN, CSSM, NEA-BC, associate vice president of perioperative services at MultiCare Health System, explained how end-to-end orchestration and governance reform drove this success without added costs to staff or facilities. Mr. Hunt is slated to present on this work at the upcoming Transform Hospital Operations Virtual Summit (September 16-7, 2025).

Here are four key takeaways from the conversation:

1. Transforming OR governance

MultiCare initially faced several challenges: inherited block schedules, weak governance, unreliable metrics, and disjointed resource allocation across its 13 hospitals.

“Each year we would do a new budget, but each year we would never really redo our block schedule so they eventually become out of sync,” Mr. Hunt said. “One of the first things we did and continue to do is every year we reset our budget.”

Traditional block utilization metrics failed to reflect true availability, particularly when surgeons released large portions of time in advance. MultiCare needed a more nuanced, real-time view of OR access.

A key initiative was replacing the administrative block committee with a physician-led utilization subcommittee that developed policies and standardized metrics. Dr. Hart, who chaired the committee for seven years, emphasized peer engagement as a key driver to innovation and improvement.

“It’s fantastic to watch them govern themselves as we work through our utilization,” Dr. Hart said. “We came up with policies, procedures as it relates to how we govern the utilization of our OR and we have made sure all of that information is as transparent as possible and it has been effective for us as we’ve moved forward and become more efficient.”

Mr. Hunt also underscored the importance of governance reform, noting that ineffective committees often default to complaint forums without the data or authority to act.

“If you don’t have an effective governance group, nothing else matters because it just eats everything else up,” Mr. Hunt said. “It was a big step for us to not just have technology but then also create the structure and process to make sure we were able to support effective scheduling.”

2. The path to dynamic access

Instead of relying solely on inherited OR blocks, MultiCare reframed the conversation around access management. Mr. Hunt shared how he and the team led efforts to rename the block committee as the utilization subcommittee, signaling a cultural shift toward flexibility and performance.

He described how LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Operating Rooms enabled the team to identify “collectable” time, large portions of underused OR hours that could be reallocated without affecting surgeon case volume. This approach preserved physician autonomy while opening access for new or growing service lines.

“This is where technology can find opportunities to collect big chunks of time that you wouldn’t normally see in a schedule,” Mr. Hunt said. “Trying to scan through block utilization numbers or go through hundreds of different block owners and find these little bits and pieces of time that could have been collected and given to somebody else.”

This scalpel-like precision, Mr. Hunt explained, offered a smarter alternative to broad utilization thresholds that failed to account for complexity, turnover times or legitimate time releases.

3. Achieving 46% more productivity

By implementing iQueue across all sites, MultiCare gained systemwide visibility into open time, staffing availability, and block utilization. A weekly regional scheduling consolidation further matched cases with available capacity, especially where staffing was constrained.

Even as the organization experienced 30% growth, MultiCare saw a 46% increase in productivity..

“We have been shocked about how popular our utilization committee is and it’s actually kind of fun,” Dr. Hart said. “As the whole staff gets better and more efficient, it creates a family that’s proud of what they’re doing.”

Mr. Hunt emphasized that visibility into staffing and open time was critical during periods of constrained anesthesia capacity.

“We went from block management to access management,” Mr. Hunt said. “Focusing on access and not just block is the only way to fully utilize our machine learning and AI tools. Truly partnering with our technology vendor to provide us support, understand the tools, education, and just be there.”

4. Driving measurable results

Between 2020 and 2023, MultiCare’s Tacoma General Hospital increased its staffed room utilization by 16% and performed 1,600 more cases without expanding its OR footprint. Primetime utilization jumped by 18%, translating to an additional 100,000 case minutes.

Importantly, MultiCare also reduced its dependence on late or emergency add-ons by explicitly reserving open time and defining utilization targets at each site. The team introduced a three-bucket model — allocated, open, and same-day add-on time — to manage scheduling flexibility and reduce daily disruptions.

This real-time visibility offered by AI-powered tools like iQueue’s Collect and SmartMatch features helped level-load across the system and identify bottlenecks before they became crises.

“None of these conversations could happen if we didn’t start giving some transparency to the data,” Mr. Hunt said. “I am really excited for this work to look at both case cost and case times.”

MultiCare is now scaling this approach through regional scheduling infrastructure and standardized metrics. It is also piloting AI-powered staff planning tools and surgical cost audits to manage variation in both labor and supply costs.

“Surgeons don’t want to be the slowest on a specific procedure,” Dr. Hart said. “They don’t want to be the most expensive and they don’t want to be the slowest. It’s nice to have this data and they can look at it and compare themselves. It makes them proud to come to work.”

Mr. Hunt will be digging deeper into MultiCare’s story at Transform Hospital Operations Virtual Summit, taking place on September 16-17, 2025. His session, “From Fragmentation to Systemness: MultiCare’s Playbook for Unifying 13 Hospitals” walks through the health system’s approach to building true perioperative systemness—delivering the right case, in the right place, at the right time. Register now to save your spot.

Please also check out our upcoming Virtual Summit: Transform Hospital Operations.

The post From block to access: Inside MultiCare’s AI-driven OR transformation appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.