Perioperative Services
A high-performing OR gives your surgical teams room to do their best work. The right approach helps get you there.
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The Challenge
Operating rooms are among the most valuable and resource-intensive components of a hospital or surgery center, yet many ORs run on underutilized block time and inconsistent throughput, leaving a high-margin department performing below its potential.
Scheduling is only part of the challenge. Care variation adds another layer, as differences in preference cards and provider-level practices drive up costs and reduce efficiency. Staffing, particularly anesthesia coverage, often isn’t well aligned with the OR schedule, creating idle time in some blocks and coverage gaps in others. Underlying all these issues is a data problem. OR leaders often lack reliable, transparent visibility into OR performance, and oftentimes, when the data does exist, it is inconsistent or inaccurate and difficult to trust, let alone act on it. As a result, decisions about block reallocation, staffing, performance metrics and scheduling often rely on anecdote or outdated assumptions rather than what’s actually happening in the OR. When this occurs, OR capacity pays the price; case volume shrinks, high-margin procedures move elsewhere, and operating margin erodes alongside them.
Why This Matters Now
- Rising costs are putting more pressure on OR throughput and anesthesia staffing alignment
- Growth ambitions can hit OR capacity limits before patient demand becomes a constraint
- EHR and scheduling tools are often underused relative to what they can do for scheduling and block management
- Inconsistent or untrustworthy OR data makes it harder to act with confidence, leaving decisions based on instinct rather than evidence
- Without the right governance, OR improvements can be difficult to sustain, allowing performance to slip over time
How We Help
Acuvance Coker works alongside your team to strengthen OR performance, improve throughput, and make better use of the capacity you already have. Our work includes:
- Block schedule and room utilization to optimize block allocation and make the most of available OR capacity
- OR throughput and efficiency improvement to improve on-time starts across all cases, not just the first case of the day,reduce turnover time, and increase daily case capacity
- OR data transparency and integrity to establish a reliable, single source of truth for block, case, and operational data, giving leaders the accurate information they need to make confident, evidence-based decisions
- Governance and KPI monitoring, including the metrics and review structure needed to sustain improvement
- Preference card and care variation management to bring surgeon preference cards into alignment and reduce the cost that provider-level variation adds to each case
- Anesthesia utilization and staffing alignment to match anesthesia coverage to the OR schedule and case volume, reducing idle time and coverage gaps
- Epic OpTime/OR Marketplace optimization to apply existing tools more effectively to scheduling and block management
What Makes Our Approach Different
We take a client-led approach to perioperative optimization, where your team leads the transformation, backed by our frameworks, benchmarks, and analytics. Working shoulder to shoulder with your staff from day one ensures your leaders build the internal capability to sustain long-term performance improvement.
We start with data to quantify and prioritize your highest-impact opportunities, giving your team a clear, reliable roadmap of targeted initiatives tailored specifically for your operating environment. We ground that data in thorough onsite observations across every stage of the perioperative journey, paired with interviews across stakeholders on all sides of the OR, so recommendations reflect what’s actually happening, not just what the numbers suggest.
Scheduling fixes alone cannot transform an OR. We partner directly with your surgeons and anesthesiologists to address the physician-level factors that shape surgical care delivery and capacity.
Finally, OR performance depends on what’s happening before a patient ever reaches the OR. We partner with our physician enterprise and digital transformation services teams to build the volume that feeds the OR, guided by a simple principle: the right cases, to the right provider, at the right time. An OR can’t grow case volume if the clinics upstream aren’t seeing more of the right patients.
What You Gain
- Greater OR capacity from the rooms and block time you already have
- More predictable surgical volume, with fewer disruptions to the OR day, from first case through the last
- Stronger financial performance from better use of OR resources
- Lower avoidable costs associated with variation in surgical care
- An OR operation that can adapt as surgical demand changes
- Improvements that your team can sustain over time through clear accountability and performance monitoring
Why Trust Coker
For more than three decades, Coker has been a trusted partner to healthcare leaders and investors, delivering clarity, compliance, and confidence through every stage of the transaction and beyond.
Positive outcomes are possible for you and your patients.
We approach every engagement with a results-driven mindset, leveraging our deep industry expertise and data-driven insights to develop strategies that drive meaningful, measurable improvements in performance.
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Solutions We Offer
We partner with clients to navigate the dynamic challenges of managing a high-performing physician enterprise.
