AI can ease the strain on our health system today

In health care, time is everything. It is a decisive factor that impacts costs, outcomes, and provider wellbeing. Yet, too often, time is wasted. Schedules are unpredictable, administrative tasks spill over beyond clinic hours, and some physicians report spending as much as 15 hours on unscheduled work each week. This inefficiency doesn’t just lead to burnout, it creates a ripple effect of waste across the system. In fact, “clinical waste,” including failures in care delivery and overtreatment, accounts for between 5.4% and 15.7% of all health care spending.

One of the clearest opportunities to address these inefficiencies lies in the operating room, where delays are costing everyone — patients, providers, and hospitals themselves — a lot of money. ORs are the financial backbone of hospitals, generating more than half of their total revenue and acting as the prime real estate in the health system as a result. At the same time, they are among the most resource-intensive areas, with high labor costs and significant operational expenses. This unique balance of generating revenue while driving costs makes the OR an ideal place to explore and implement strategies for improving operational efficiency.

Operating rooms may be at the forefront of cutting-edge science and technology, but they continue to face significant challenges regarding efficiency. Delays are both common and costly, stemming from a combination of human errors and system and process inefficiencies. These include shortages of trained support staff, communication gaps among surgical teams, and inadequate preparation of the OR before surgeries.

Every minute in the OR carries a price tag. On average, one minute of OR time costs $46.04, excluding anesthesia and specialty services. A 15-minute delay can add $690 to a procedure’s cost, while a 90-minute delay can drive costs up by over $4,000. Labor accounts for two-thirds of these costs.

Despite this clear economic incentive — beyond the care imperative — to avoid delays and eliminate wasted time in the OR, delays remain more common than not. Studies routinely find over half of surgical procedures have at least one setback; in some places, the number is as high as 60%. With delays occurring in the majority of cases, it’s clear there is massive potential for widespread system and process efficiency improvements in ORs across the country.

As these delays add up, they often lead to OR days running late. Late days impact everyone involved. They affect patients and their caregivers, providing a less optimal care experience at best or a worse health outcome at worst. They affect the surgeons and surgical staff, compounding burnout pressures. And they can also affect the hospital bottom line, as overtime minutes mean even more expensive labor costs.

This is where artificial intelligence comes in. AI has immense potential to address these efficiency challenges across health care. But to truly make a difference, AI needs to simplify processes rather than add complexity. By automating time-consuming administrative tasks and reducing the cognitive load on providers, AI can help care teams focus on delivering high-quality patient care.

AI in operating rooms can ambiently gather data in real time, eliminating data and information delays while arming perioperative teams with a more complete picture of the situation. Automatic data-gathering, when done right, also removes concerns about inaccurate or imprecise data, while freeing clinicians from time spent on these administrative tasks.

In my experience, the most deft and outcomes-oriented hospitals think about time and cost as fixed quantities, but they see efficiency as a function of two key factors: coordination among the entire surgical and perioperative teams and mastery of insights (not simply documentation).

Fundamentally, one of AI’s greatest benefits in the OR is to unify staff around the common goals of serving as many patients as possible, increasing case volume while making the most of everyone's time, and avoiding delays and overtime.

Improving how health care workers spend their time through AI isn’t just about cutting costs or increasing revenue. It’s about easing the burden on clinicians so they can focus on what they do best: providing the highest quality care to the most patients they can with the time and resources they already have.

In the OR, for example, AI can predict and prevent downtime and delays before, during, and after surgeries, ensuring operations run smoothly. Ultimately, this new technology can create a more sustainable health care system for everyone.

David Schummers is co-founder and chief executive officer of Apella, a health technology company that developed the world’s only real-time OR management platform.