Skytron Blog

Every OR leader is dealing with a version of the same short list right now: not enough staff, more cases than the schedule can comfortably absorb, technology that was supposed to simplify workflows but added steps instead, and documentation requirements that pull clinical staff away from the work they were trained to do. These pressures are not new, and they are not going away.

The problem is not that leaders aren’t working hard enough to address them. The problem is that the solutions proposed are often created for a facility that doesn’t actually exist — a one-size-fits-all version of the OR that looks good on a blueprint but doesn’t hold up in practice.
 

The Same Problem, a Different Room Every Time

Walk into ten different ORs, and you will find ten genuinely different operational realities, even when the headline challenges sound identical.

A four-room community hospital running primarily general surgery cases with a small surgical team operates nothing like a sixteen-room academic medical center inside a health system with standardized product mandates and system-wide technology requirements. A specialty-focused ASC doing high volumes of orthopedic cases in a recently built facility faces entirely different constraints than a regional hospital whose OR was last renovated fifteen years ago and whose infrastructure predates the technology now being asked to run through it.

The staffing pressure may be the same. The documentation burden may be the same. But the variables underneath — room count, case mix, surgeon preferences, how recently the facility was built, whether the organization operates under union agreements, and what the health system requires versus what the local team needs — are different enough that a solution designed for one environment will land differently in another.

Research has consistently shown that OR performance metrics like turnover time, first case on-time starts, and utilization rates vary significantly across facility types, making direct comparisons between academic medical centers, community hospitals, and ASCs unreliable without accounting for those structural differences.¹
 

Eight Leaders, Eight Different Answers

Earlier this year, Becker’s Hospital Review asked eight perioperative leaders the same question: where is OR capacity being silently lost? They got eight different answers.

Delayed starts and turnover creep at one facility. Misaligned block schedules at another. Staffing models that left rooms technically open but functionally unavailable. Add-on cases creating fragments of time too short to fill reliably. Referral patterns sending cases to larger institutions that a community facility could have handled.

None of those leaders were wrong. They were each accurately describing their specific facility. The variables were different, so the problems looked different, and the solutions that would actually move the needle were different too.

This is the gap that rarely gets named directly. The conversation about OR performance tends to reach for universal answers to problems that are fundamentally local.
 

What Helps

There is no single fix. But there are approaches that tend to hold up across facility types.

Start with an honest assessment of your specific variables before evaluating any solution. A tool or workflow that improved first case starts at a facility with a different case mix, a different staffing model, and a different physical setup may not produce the same result in your OR.

Benchmark against facilities that actually look like yours. OR time is one of the most expensive resources in any hospital — cost estimates range from $15 to over $100 per minute depending on facility type, case complexity, and how costs are calculated.² Comparing your utilization numbers against a facility with a fundamentally different operational profile will tell you very little about where your specific losses are occurring.

Look at how your existing systems connect before adding new ones. Fragmented technology is one of the most consistently documented sources of workflow inefficiency in perioperative environments — not because the individual tools are inadequate, but because they were implemented without a clear picture of how they would communicate with each other.³ Integration is often more valuable than addition.

And involve the clinical team early. The gap between what the data shows and what the team experiences is often where the real answer lives.

Start With Your Room

OR performance is not a problem with a universal solution. It is a collection of facility-specific challenges that share a common vocabulary but rarely share a common root cause. The facilities making consistent progress are the ones that resist the temptation to borrow someone else’s answer and do the harder work of understanding their own variables first.

Skytron designs clinical equipment and OR systems around the reality that no two facilities are the same. From surgical tables and lighting to video integration and ceiling infrastructure, the goal is always flexibility and integration — solutions that work within your specific environment rather than asking your environment to conform to them.

That process starts early, and Skytron works alongside facilities and clinical teams from initial planning through implementation to ensure each room is designed for how it will function in real clinical scenarios.
 

 
References
1. Anesthesia & Analgesia. Industry-Wide Survey of Academic Anesthesiology Departments Provides Up-to-Date Benchmarking Data on Surgical Anesthesia Productivity. 2020.
2. JAMA Surgery. Understanding Costs of Care in the Operating Room. 2018.
3. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care. Using Integrated Operating Rooms to Improve Workflow: Mapping Review. 2024.
4. Becker’s Hospital Review. Hidden OR Capacity Challenges: 8 Perioperative Leaders on What’s Draining Surgical Time. March 2026.