At Tampa General Hospital, block allocation is the foundation of surgical access, throughput, and financial health. For a Level 1 trauma center, the challenge is constant: balancing high elective volumes against the unpredictable surge of emergency cases. In this environment, even a minor misalignment in block time creates a ripple effect across the entire hospital.
Leadership targets 85% block utilization as a benchmark — a threshold designed to protect access while minimizing unused time. But in early 2025, perioperative leaders began to notice a pattern: one of the hospital’s highest-volume service lines appeared to have underused block time, while other services struggled to secure OR access.
Adjusting block allocation is one of the most sensitive operational changes a hospital can make. It directly affects surgeon satisfaction, perceptions of fairness, and service line growth. Without defensible, objective data, even well-founded concerns can stall before meaningful change begins.
When block allocation doesn’t reflect true demand
Before partnering with Apella, Tampa General relied on reporting systems that required manual data pulls and offered limited forecasting flexibility. While leaders suspected block time was misaligned with demand, anecdotal observations weren’t enough to justify reallocation.
Block allocation is fundamentally a supply-and-demand equation: reserved OR time must match expected case volume.
- When supply exceeds demand, hours go unused.
- When demand exceeds supply, access becomes constrained.
At a high-volume academic medical center, those mismatches represent both lost patient access and lost financial opportunity. Leadership needed a transparent way to:
- Quantify underused time
- Forecast demand more accurately
- Separate elective and trauma utilization
- Support fact-based conversations about reallocating hours
Learn how Tampa General identified 56 hours of capacity per week through block analysis.
Read the case study
Using objective data to surface the opportunity
To build a defensible case for change, Tampa General partnered with Apella to conduct a detailed block-optimization analysis of the underused service line.
Rather than relying on manually entered timestamps, the analysis drew on objectively captured ambient video data, which creates a built-in layer of trust and transparency.
Apella provided a day-by-day view of current utilization and forecasted demand. For each weekday block, the team forecasted the hours truly needed to meet expected case volume based on historical patterns, then compared those hours to current allocations. The results validated leadership’s initial concern.
Within this single service line, Apella identified 56 hours of block time per week that could be reallocated without compromising surgical volume.
Right-sizing block time without reducing volume
By analyzing elective and trauma utilization separately, clear trends emerged:
- On some days, elective utilization exceeded the 85% target, signaling demand for additional hours
- Trauma utilization was consistently low on most days, indicating excess allocated time
This insight created an opportunity to rebalance block time by shifting hours from trauma to elective blocks while reducing overall allocated time for the service line.
Just as importantly, the data's objectivity changed the conversation. Because the analysis was based on passively detected data rather than manually entered timestamps, it was trusted, enabling collaborative, confident adjustments between operations and surgical leadership.
Building a sustainable optimization process
Encouraged by the results, Tampa General began expanding the analysis to additional service lines, aiming to establish an ongoing, data-driven approach to block optimization. With a transparent, objective baseline in place, leadership can now:
- Identify new opportunities
- Make incremental adjustments
- Track impact over time
The takeaway is clear: block allocation is too important, and too politically sensitive, to manage without trusted data.
By grounding decisions in objectively captured evidence, Tampa General not only uncovered 56 hours of weekly capacity but also strengthened alignment, transparency, and confidence in how OR time is distributed.
Learn how Tampa General identified 56 hours of capacity per week through block analysis.
Read the case study