Throughput, Coordination, and Safety: What to Expect at Periop Leader Week 2026

Every perioperative leader has felt the same tension at some point: the push to grow surgical volume and case throughput on one side, and the responsibility to protect patient safety on the other. For years, those two goals got treated as a trade-off — more cases, more risk; more caution, less throughput.

That framing is starting to break down. And Periop Leader Week 2026 — October 4 to 7 at the Convention Center in Savannah, Georgia — is shaping up to be the clearest signal yet that patient safety and capacity and resource optimization aren't separate tracks anymore. They're parts of the same conversation, discussed from different angles, and increasingly solved through better coordination and collaboration across the surgical team, supported by better operational data and technologies.

Periop Leader Week is the newly unified event bringing together the OR Manager Conference and the OR Business Management Summit, which means the leaders debating patient throughput, block time governance, and resource utilization are sitting in the same room as the leaders responsible for infection prevention, high reliability, and survey readiness. That's not a scheduling coincidence. It reflects where the field is actually headed: operational optimization and patient safety in the operating room are now measured and reported using some of the same real-time data and, increasingly, improved using the same cross-functional collaboration between and decision making across clinical, operational, and business leaders.

Apella will be on-site in Savannah as a sponsor in Booth 319. If you're an OR Director, VP of Perioperative Services, ASC Administrator, or OR Business Leader trying to square growth and throughput targets with safety metrics, we'd love to talk.

Contact us to meet in Savannah and learn more about Apella.
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A session we're especially looking forward to

Among the many sessions on the Periop Leader Week agenda, one specifically stands out:

The Numbers Behind the Narrative: How Surgical Volume Growth Can Improve Patient Safety  🗓️ Monday, October 5  🕥 10:30am  📍Meeting Room 203

This session brings together Kate Ulrich, Perioperative and Surgical Services Leader; Beth Orr, Director of Perioperative Services at Virginia Mason Medical Center; Yessenia Salgado, Senior Director of Clinical Operations at Tampa General Hospital; and Kelby Perry, Director of Business Operations at Tampa General Hospital — four perioperative leaders who have spent real time in the data trenches translating OR throughput and resource optimization metrics into decisions that hold up in front of surgeons, executives, and regulators alike.

All four are current or former Apella users, having worked with our ambient AI platform at Tampa General Hospital and Houston Methodist, and we've had the privilege of working alongside teams like theirs as they've built the case that volume growth and patient safety aren't opposing forces — they're intertwined stories, told with some of the same data and built on the same foundation of coordination between perioperative, physician, and administrative teams.

If you attend one session on the throughput-versus-safety question, we'd point you to this one. It's a chance to hear directly from leaders who've had to answer the hard question, "How do we know growth isn't costing us patient safety and surgical quality?" with data and collaboration, not defensiveness.

What else to expect on the agenda

Beyond that session, a few themes recur across the Periop Leader Week tracks that are worth watching if you're building your own schedule:

• Throughput and Resource Optimization. How do you get more cases through existing rooms, staff, and blocks — without adding cost? This is arguably the central operational question of the conference, showing up across sessions on flow, capacity, and smart technology adoption. Leaders are looking for practical ways to identify unused time, reduce turnover delays, and make the most of the resources they already have before requesting more.
• Block Time Governance and Utilization. Closely related but distinct are sessions on scheduling accuracy and block allocation. Reallocating block time remains one of the most politically charged conversations in any OR. Leaders are looking for objective, data-backed approaches to scheduling and capacity.
• Coordination and Collaboration Across the Surgical Team. Several sessions focus explicitly on how surgeons, anesthesia, nursing, and perioperative leadership can coordinate more effectively — from real-time communication systems to cross-functional accountability — as a lever for both efficiency and safety.
• Smart Technology Adoption. Panels examining how to overcome fear and inertia around AI and ambient technology in perioperative settings, and how to build the ROI case for the C-suite, reflect just how mainstream this conversation has become, especially compared to just two years ago, when the OR Manager conference featured multiple intro-level sessions on artificial intelligence in and around the operating room.
• High Reliability and Survey Readiness. Infection prevention, sterile technique, and environmental controls remain foundational. Increasingly, leaders are connecting these safety systems to the same real-time data they use for OR operations to optimize case throughput and limited resources.
• ASC Growth and Case Migration. With CMS continuing to expand the list of procedures approved for outpatient settings, ASC leaders are navigating how to scale safely while hospitals plan for the volume and revenue implications.
• Workforce Stability and Leadership Development. Staffing models, retention strategies, and the next generation of perioperative leaders remain a constant thread because nothing matters if you can't keep a coordinated team in the room to execute it.

Together, these tracks tell a coherent story: perioperative leadership in 2026 is a discipline of case throughput, resource optimization, coordination, and collaboration, as much as it is a clinical one.

Find us in Booth 319

Apella's ambient AI platform gives perioperative teams the real-time, phase-level visibility they need to make exactly the kind of coordinated decisions backed by ground-truth data this year's Periop Leader Week agenda is built around. We'll be in Booth 319 at the Savannah Convention Center on Monday and Tuesday.

And if you can make it to Meeting Room 203 on Monday at 10:30am, we think you'll walk away with a sharper answer to one of the field's hardest questions: How do you grow surgical volume and throughput without compromising the safety of the patients of whom you're trying to serve more?

Contact us to meet in Savannah and learn more about Apella.
Get in touch