Kick off your learning early at one of our two pre-conference workshops! We'll be covering updates to The Joint Commission standards as well as providing new and emerging leaders with the skills and information they need to succeed. Stay tuned for more information!

As the name suggests, the Reverse Expo flips the traditional expo format – the vendors come to you for one-on-one meetings! We understand your time at the conference is valuable, and you need to make the most of your time on the Periop Networking & Innovation Hall finding the partners and solution providers that fulfill your needs. 

To express interest in participating, confirm during registration or complete this form.

Perks of participation: Receive a complimentary hotel room night for Sunday evening and access to a VIP reception immediately following! Confirm your interest during registration and you will be contacted shortly with details.*

*Participation in the Reverse Expo is required. If you are approved and agree to participate, but do not attend the Reverse Expo event, your room night coverage will be rescinded.

OR nursing leaders are often tasked with the responsibility and oversight of capital planning and acquisition for surgical equipment and technologies. However, many nurse leaders lack the experience and financial acumen necessary to develop a compelling justification for capital expenditure to the C-suite.

With competition for capital dollars fierce, nursing leaders must be confident when building a compelling business case for replacement, incremental and new technologies to support clinical priorities. Traditional budgeting processes are no longer enough to advance capital projects; nursing leaders must build a strong financial case to compete at the C-suite table for essential investment dollars to support the OR.

In this session, Dr. McKenzie will prepare the OR nurse leader with the essential skills necessary to develop a robust business case that supports justification for investments in capital equipment and new technology projects. She will provide advanced frameworks for evaluating and prioritizing capital projects, review the essential elements of developing a business case, and describe how to leverage return on investment (ROI) through multiple value streams to create a robust justification for capital investment. Dr. McKenzie will create a roadmap for discussing key components of the business case, as well as a template that may be used within any healthcare organization to ensure the key elements for a successful and compelling business care are organized and well defined for successful execution.

Learning objectives:

• Increase knowledge of key components necessary to create a robust business case for capital equipment acquisition
• Share three examples of return on investment (ROI) components for a compelling capital business case
• Increase knowledge of significant stakeholder engagement when developing a strategic business case for healthcare projects.  

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has approved many hundreds of surgical procedure types to be performed in outpatient settings over the last decade, including hundreds more this year. Now the federal agency plans to eliminate its Inpatient-Only (IPO) list of procedures entirely by Jan. 1, 2028. While that move portends even greater freedom for patients and surgeons in terms of where their operations can be performed, it presents a major problem for many hospitals that could lose even more significant revenue and patient volume to ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) than they already have.

In this session, an expert panel will discuss the business impacts of this imminent regulatory and financial development on hospitals and health systems, as well as proactive strategies and opportunities for a successful and profitable transition, including building or acquiring ASCs or entering into ASC joint ventures; patient selection and safety considerations; how inpatient hospitals can avoid significant loss of revenue and OR usage from both payor denials and the preferences of surgeons and patients; and much more. Following the panel, a Q&A session will allow attending perioperative business leaders to acquire further information and insight about this market-altering development.

Margins can be tight in surgery, but the accelerating combination of reduced reimbursements and rising costs is adding to the pressure. During this interactive panel discussion, leaders will discuss how to contain costs, negotiate for better rates with payors and vendors, find value at the margins and boost efficiencies so your ASC can stay safe, effective and profitable.

Learning objectives:

• Analyze key financial pressures impacting ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) by examining current trends in declining reimbursements and rising operational costs, and evaluating how these forces are reshaping ASC financial performance and sustainability.
• Identify practical strategies to optimize revenue and control costs by exploring actionable approaches for improving payor contract negotiations, managing supply chain expenses, and leveraging data to uncover margin opportunities.
• Apply operational efficiencies to maintain quality and profitability by discussing real-world tactics to streamline workflows, enhance staffing models, and improve case mix management while maintaining patient safety and regulatory compliance.

Acquiring new technology in perioperative services can greatly enhance efficiency and clinical outcomes... unless it doesn't. In this session, panelists will discuss how to most effectively implement new technology in the OR and elsewhere by engaging staff throughout the process, educating them properly, and achieving full buy-in from your teams.

You’ve been cited for them, told to follow them, searched for them in a dusty binder, and maybe even tried to decode the tiny insert that came with a new instrument. Manufacturer’s instructions for use (IFUs) are central to safe device reprocessing, but they are not always easy to find, interpret, or apply in real-world perioperative and sterile processing environments.

This session will take perioperative leaders on an “IFU Odyssey” through the practical challenges of using manufacturer instructions from the point of use to sterile storage. We will explore the dangers teams encounter along the way, including surveyor scrutiny, inconsistent interpretation, overly strict or overly lenient application, risk assessments that do not meaningfully reduce risk, and the ongoing tension between compliance, patient safety, and operational efficiency.

Perioperative leaders will leave with a clearer understanding of how to navigate IFU-related challenges, support frontline teams, and evaluate when risk assessment, escalation, or process redesign is needed. The session will also look ahead to the future state of IFUs, including what the industry needs from manufacturers, regulators, and healthcare organizations to create standardized instructions that are validated, usable, and built for the people responsible for keeping patients safe.

Learning objectives:

• Describe the current state of manufacturer’s instructions for use, including common challenges with access, interpretation, usability, and alignment with real-world perioperative and sterile processing workflows.
• Apply practical strategies for complying with IFUs in the current environment, including balancing patient safety, regulatory expectations, workflow efficiency, risk assessment, and interdisciplinary escalation.
• Identify opportunities to shape the future of IFUs, including improved standardization, usability, validation, and collaboration between manufacturers, regulators, healthcare organizations, and frontline users.

Developing a pipeline of new perioperative leaders who are prepared to step into key roles after their predecessors move on or retire is crucial to maintaining the stability of your surgical operations. However, many of today’s talented young staff view leadership roles differently than their more experienced counterparts do. Particularly, they may display “leadership hesitancy” – a fearful or self-doubting reluctance to take on the time demands and heavy responsibilities of a management position.

In this panel, veteran perioperative leaders will discuss what it really takes to attract, engage and develop today’s young talent into new, high-achieving perioperative leaders. They’ll explore how to redefine leadership for young staff who might wonder why they’d ever sign up to be a perioperative leader in the first place. They’ll discuss how to mentally prepare prospective young leaders for the trials and tribulations of management positions, how to address the fear, uncertainty and doubt that can feed their worries about “imposter syndrome,” and describe how to most effectively get young talent to jump at the opportunity to “lean into leadership.”

Learning objectives:

• Identify and address "leadership hesitancy" among emerging perioperative staff
• Redefine perioperative leadership to align with the values of the next generation
• Implement strategies to attract, engage, and develop high-potential perioperative talent
• Prepare emerging leaders for the realities and responsibilities of leadership roles

An increasing number of procedures, and the increased patient volume that comes with them, have been migrating to ASCs for well over a decade. Now, with the possible elimination of CMS’ entire Inpatient-Only list in January 2028, high-acuity cases such as cardiovascular and complex spine that have traditionally been handled in hospital settings due to safety concerns are already making the move to the outpatient setting.

What considerations should ASC leaders make to safely and profitably add high-acuity service lines? This panel will dive into the numerous factors that influence these crucial decisions.

Learning objectives:

• Evaluate the clinical and regulatory implications of shifting high-acuity procedures to the ASC setting by assessing how the potential elimination of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Inpatient-Only list impacts case selection, patient safety requirements, and compliance considerations.
• Identify key infrastructure, staffing, and credentialing requirements for high-acuity service lines by examining the operational readiness needed to support complex procedures, including facility capabilities, anesthesia support, privileging criteria, and emergency preparedness.
• Analyze financial risks and opportunities associated with expanding into higher-acuity cases by exploring reimbursement dynamics, payor considerations, cost structures, and volume projections to determine how to safely scale services while maintaining profitability.

Surgical robot purchases are often the subject of splashy hospital press releases, and their presence can attract surgeons and patients alike to a facility. After the initial hype fades, however, some surgeons might begin to avoid the robot and revert to their traditional techniques, while other surgeons might use the robot for procedures that would be much cheaper to perform otherwise.

Even if this isn’t the case at your facility, the question remains: Is your hospital or ASC deriving maximum value, and the expected return on investment, on that seven-figure robot purchase?

 In this panel discussion, experts will zero in on how to optimize the use of your surgical robot from a business standpoint, including the types of cases that make the most financial sense to perform robotically, avoiding “robotic overkill” procedures, winning over skeptical surgeons, accounting for the true costs involved in purchasing and maintaining a robotic platform, maximizing efficiencies in use, setup and turnover, sterile processing requirements, training surgeons and staff, understanding the nature of your relationship with your robot vendor, and more.

Block time utilization is a key to increasing surgical throughput and OR capacity, especially in today’s context of limited resources. However, any plan to boost case volume is typically met with concerns about care quality and patient safety. But what if the lever for operational efficiency turned out to also be a source of improved safety?

In this panel discussion, perioperative leadership will share their experience and results from deploying ambient intelligence — a combination of an AI predictions engine, real time analytics, and computer vision across ORs — with the initial goal of anticipating and preventing the cascade of delays that often define the surgical day, but ultimately resulting in optimized scheduling and prevention of patient infections that lead to recidivism.

When surgical teams can trust their data — and each other — everyone benefits: patients get better, faster, safer care; staff find more predictability; and hospitals gain the capacity to sustain it all. The panel will provide actionable takeaways for attendees on implementing and tracking ambient AI and computer vision tools to improve productivity, reduce costs, and improve patient safety. 

Patient identification is a foundational element of patient care, yet errors continue to occur despite established protocols and regulatory requirements. While the use of two patient identifiers is standard practice, knowing the patient’s identity alone is not enough to ensure that the intended patient is receiving care. In the fast-paced operating room environment, familiarity, assumptions, interruptions, and workflow pressures can subtly compromise verification processes.

This presentation examines perioperative patient identification near misses identified through quality improvement review at a major academic medical center. By analyzing de-identified events, participants will explore system and human factors that contribute to near misses, including communication breakdowns, handoff vulnerabilities, confirmation bias, and overreliance on task-based checklists. These insights have informed the development of enhanced patient verification practices that move beyond checklist compliance toward shared cognitive processes.

Lessons learned from these near misses are translated into practice through creative, interdisciplinary education strategies. A series of interactive, video-based scenarios was developed to engage perioperative teams, reinforce shared cognitive processes, and strengthen team-based verification.

By leveraging near misses as opportunities for learning and system improvement, perioperative teams can enhance patient identification practices and reduce preventable harm. This session underscores the critical role of the perioperative nurse in not only knowing the patient but confidently knowing they have the correct patient.

Learning objectives:

• Analyze perioperative workflows to identify high-risk behaviors that increase the likelihood of patient identification errors
• Identify perioperative-specific behaviors that reduce the risk of patient identification errors across all phases of care
• Evaluate how structured learning systems can be leveraged to standardize perioperative patient identification practices, reduce variability, and prevent identification errors

Join us for a featured luncheon session presented by one of our valued industry partners. These sessions offer a unique opportunity to explore innovative solutions, emerging technologies, and real-world strategies designed to address today’s most pressing perioperative challenges.

Each presentation delivers practical insights you can take back to your organization—whether you’re focused on improving efficiency, strengthening financial performance, enhancing patient safety, or supporting your team. Hear directly from solution providers and subject matter experts who are working alongside perioperative leaders to drive measurable results.

Join us for a featured luncheon session presented by one of our valued industry partners. These sessions offer a unique opportunity to explore innovative solutions, emerging technologies, and real-world strategies designed to address today’s most pressing perioperative challenges.

Each presentation delivers practical insights you can take back to your organization—whether you’re focused on improving efficiency, strengthening financial performance, enhancing patient safety, or supporting your team. Hear directly from solution providers and subject matter experts who are working alongside perioperative leaders to drive measurable results.

Open to Premier, All-Access, Conference, Speakers, Committee, Volunteer, Press, and Exhibitor Conference Passholders.

Join us for a featured luncheon session presented by one of our valued industry partners. These sessions offer a unique opportunity to explore innovative solutions, emerging technologies, and real-world strategies designed to address today’s most pressing perioperative challenges.

Each presentation delivers practical insights you can take back to your organization—whether you’re focused on improving efficiency, strengthening financial performance, enhancing patient safety, or supporting your team. Hear directly from solution providers and subject matter experts who are working alongside perioperative leaders to drive measurable results.

Open to Premier, All-Access, Conference, Speakers, Committee, Volunteer, Press, and Exhibitor Conference Passholders.

Cyberattacks on healthcare systems have escalated in frequency and complexity, posing significant risks to patient safety, operational continuity, and financial stability. The perioperative environment, dependent on interconnected technology, real-time data, and tightly coordinated workflows, is particularly vulnerable. This presentation will examine how cyber threats disrupt surgical services, drawing on real world incidents to highlight vulnerabilities in scheduling systems, anesthesia workstations, EHR connectivity, sterile processing communication, and critical equipment. Attendees will gain an understanding of the immediate and downstream consequences of system outages, including delays in surgical care, compromised documentation, communication failures, and increased clinical risk.

This session will outline actionable strategies for OR leaders to strengthen cyber preparedness, including incident response planning, redundancy development, staff training, risk communication, and collaboration with IT and executive leadership. Emphasis will be placed on building resilience, maintaining patient safety during downtime, and ensuring rapid recovery after a breach. Attendees will be better equipped to lead their teams through cyber disruptions and safeguard the surgical environment from emerging digital threats.

Efficiency in the operating room isn’t just about the people who work there. It’s also about the design and structure of the operating room itself. In this session, healthcare architects and designers will share insights and ideas about how to improve the design and layouts of your existing ORs with the goal of maximizing efficiency, and provide a solid grounding for the factors you should consider and address when building new ORs.

Perioperative business management can mean different things at difficult facilities. Clinical leaders and staff might not understand exactly what you do, and the C-suite might wonder if data analysts and artificial intelligence can handle many of the aspects of your position, or even make it obsolete. There’s tremendous pressure to deliver and prove results, and to justify what you do, to those both above and below you in the org chart.

In this session, nurse leaders and the C-suite will join perioperative business managers on stage to discuss what they expect of each other, how to work together, integrating the business side with the clinical side, how to define a business manager’s true value, and more.

Hospitals and health systems have teams and technology that track equipment lifecycles and maintenance schedules, allowing leaders to project and prepare for replacements and new investments. Many freestanding ASCs, however, operate with a less structured approach. When equipment breaks down, is your ASC prepared? On this panel, experts will discuss how to better track your valuable and vital equipment to ensure that your center never gets caught off-guard when equipment inevitably malfunctions or ages out.

Perioperative culture is often shaped not only by what is taught, but by what is tolerated. Over time, inefficiencies, workarounds, and behaviors become normalized. That normalization impacts workforce engagement, psychological safety and, ultimately, patient outcomes. Yet those patterns are rarely examined through multiple lenses at once.

This session brings together professionals with two distinct perspectives: a seasoned perioperative leader with over two decades of operating room and executive experience, and a second-career perioperative nurse and executive leadership coach who is experiencing the profession through the lens of an adult learner. Together, these two perspectives will illuminate the gap between what has been accepted and what should be challenged.

Participants will explore common cultural challenges within perioperative teams, including normalized dysfunction, unspoken hierarchies, and the reliance on workarounds to sustain operations. The session will examine the impact of these patterns on workforce stability, team dynamics, and patient care while highlighting how experience can both inform and obscure opportunities for improvement.

Moving beyond awareness, this interactive session will also focus on empowerment, particularly in terms of equipping both staff and leaders with practical approaches to influence cultural change. By integrating system-level design with individual leadership behaviors, participants will gain strategies to challenge accepted norms, foster psychological safety, and drive sustainable improvements within their practice environments. Participants will be encouraged reflect on their own role in shaping culture and to commit to leaving the profession better than they found it!

Learning objectives: 

• Identify common patterns of normalized dysfunction within perioperative culture such as workarounds, hierarchical barriers, and inefficient practices, and examine their impact on workforce engagement, psychological safety, and patient outcomes.
• Differentiate between experience-informed practices that add value and those that unintentionally perpetuate ineffective or unsafe norms, using multiple perspectives to uncover blind spots in the perioperative environments.
• Apply practical leadership behaviors and system-level strategies to challenge entrenched practices, foster psychological safety, and drive sustainable culture change within the perioperative setting.

Our Exhibitor Presented CE Sessions are 30-minute learning opportunities led by solution providers who understand today’s perioperative challenges. Each session is designed to deliver practical ideas, real-world applications, and tools you can take back to your team.

Attend two sessions and earn one additional CE credit while exploring innovations that support staffing, efficiency, and performance.

Check back soon for session details as we finalize presentations with our partners.

Step into the Periop Networking & Innovation Hall and recharge with purpose.

The Afternoon Refreshment Break is your time to connect, explore, and refuel. Grab a drink, meet peers facing similar challenges, and discover solutions designed to improve staffing, efficiency, and performance.

Make every minute count and leave with ideas you can put into action.

Start your day with fresh insights and practical strategies at our sponsored breakfast session. Hosted by one of our trusted industry partners, these morning presentations are designed to deliver actionable ideas that address the real challenges perioperative leaders face—from staffing and efficiency to financial performance and patient care.

Enjoy breakfast while hearing directly from experts and solution providers who are helping organizations like yours drive measurable results. Walk away with new perspectives, proven approaches, and tools you can put into action right away.

Fuel your morning—and your strategy—for the day ahead.

Open to Premier, All-Access, Conference, Speakers, Committee, Volunteer, Press, and Exhibitor Conference Passholders.
 

Start your day with fresh insights and practical strategies at our sponsored breakfast session. Hosted by one of our trusted industry partners, these morning presentations are designed to deliver actionable ideas that address the real challenges perioperative leaders face—from staffing and efficiency to financial performance and patient care.

Enjoy breakfast while hearing directly from experts and solution providers who are helping organizations like yours drive measurable results. Walk away with new perspectives, proven approaches, and tools you can put into action right away.

Fuel your morning—and your strategy—for the day ahead.

Open to Premier, All-Access, Conference, Speakers, Committee, Volunteer, Press, and Exhibitor Conference Passholders.

The stress, pace, and responsibility of perioperative leadership can weigh heavily on both the mind and body. In this interactive, informative, and fun session, healthcare leader Hazel Boyd — seasoned advisor, serial marathon runner, and professionally trained personal development and mindset mentor — will explore the personal impact of leadership in today’s healthcare environment.

Ms. Boyd will help participants gauge the level of burnout in the room, share practical strategies for leading high‑performing teams while managing fatigue, and outline steps leaders can take to strengthen their mindset, energy, and resilience.

If you’re feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, or simply running low, this session will lift you up and equip you with tools you can carry through the days, weeks, months, and years ahead in your career.

Learning objectives:

• Identify key contributors to leadership burnout and describe how mindset, energy management, and leadership behaviors influence personal well‑being and team resilience.
• Assess your own risk for burnout and leadership strain using guided reflection and self‑assessment tools, and interpret results to identify priority areas for renewal and growth.
• Select and commit to evidence‑informed leadership strategies that support sustained energy, healthy work environments, and long‑term engagement for yourself and your teams.

Facilities trying to keep case costs down face a growing challenge around the supplies needed to perform surgery. PPE, medications, syringes, tubes, and other supplies are prone to shortages, price hikes and tariffs, and we can expect more difficulties moving forward due to the high level of volatility in the global economy and the supply chains that power it. In this peer-to-peer roundtable, discuss supply management and supply chain concerns and cost-saving strategies with your peers, including how and why to standardize supply SKUs across your facility and system, how to achieve staff and surgeon buy-in and awareness around the issue, the amount of supplies you should have in reserve, smarter utilization of supplies to avoid case cancelations and delays, building accountable relationships with key vendors, tracking and projecting costs, and more.

Many ASCs are having a difficult time recruiting and retaining valuable staff members and providers such as nurses, anesthesia professionals and sterile processing techs. In addition to shortages of quality, qualified potential team members in the local and national labor pool, ASCs often find themselves competing for available talent with much larger hospitals and health systems that can offer payment and benefit packages that exceed what many surgery centers can offer.

In this interactive panel discussion, ASC leaders and staffing experts will discuss what it really takes to recruit and capture talent – as well as hold onto that talent for the long term – in 2026 and beyond.

With so much in the OR digitally integrated and interconnected, and with data informing and driving so many decisions in perioperative services, the risk of a cyberattack can bring your service lines to their knees. In this panel, cybersecurity experts will discuss the unique threats that cybercrime poses to your surgical services, how you should prepare for the worst, and whom you should engage to lock down your systems.

This presentation will expose the real-world consequences of breakdowns in credentialing and privileging across healthcare facilities of all sizes. From overlooked red flags to incomplete verification and weak oversight, this session uncovers how system failures—not just individual mistakes—can allow unqualified or impaired practitioners into the operating room. Through compelling case examples, regulatory insights, and audit findings, attendees will learn where processes fail, why they fail, and how to build resilient, defensible credentialing systems that protect patients and organizations alike.

Learning objectives:

• Identify common credentialing and privileging breakdowns across healthcare facilities that contribute to patient safety risks, regulatory deficiencies, and liability exposure.
• Evaluate real-world scenarios to recognize warning signs, process gaps, and system-level failures that allow unsafe practitioners to obtain or maintain privileges. 
• Apply best practices to strengthen credentialing, privileging, and ongoing monitoring processes (including FPPE/OPPE) to ensure compliance, accountability, and patient safety.

Sponsor-led sessions at Periop Leader Week are designed to deliver practical solutions to today’s most pressing perioperative challenges directly from organizations working alongside leaders in the field. Each session is tailored to its breakout track, offering focused insights on staffing, efficiency, financial performance, technology, and workflow optimization. Expect real-world applications, actionable tools, and opportunities to explore innovative approaches that can be implemented immediately, helping you make more informed decisions for your team, your operations, and your organization.

Sessions to be presented by: Opmed.AI

Sponsor-led sessions at Periop Leader Week are designed to deliver practical solutions to today’s most pressing perioperative challenges directly from organizations working alongside leaders in the field. Each session is tailored to its breakout track, offering focused insights on staffing, efficiency, financial performance, technology, and workflow optimization. Expect real-world applications, actionable tools, and opportunities to explore innovative approaches that can be implemented immediately, helping you make more informed decisions for your team, your operations, and your organization.

Sessions to be presented by: Surgical Safety Technologies Inc.

Sponsor-led sessions at Periop Leader Week are designed to deliver practical solutions to today’s most pressing perioperative challenges directly from organizations working alongside leaders in the field. Each session is tailored to its breakout track, offering focused insights on staffing, efficiency, financial performance, technology, and workflow optimization. Expect real-world applications, actionable tools, and opportunities to explore innovative approaches that can be implemented immediately, helping you make more informed decisions for your team, your operations, and your organization.

Sessions to be presented by: SIPS Healthcare Solutions

Sponsor-led sessions at Periop Leader Week are designed to deliver practical solutions to today’s most pressing perioperative challenges directly from organizations working alongside leaders in the field. Each session is tailored to its breakout track, offering focused insights on staffing, efficiency, financial performance, technology, and workflow optimization. Expect real-world applications, actionable tools, and opportunities to explore innovative approaches that can be implemented immediately, helping you make more informed decisions for your team, your operations, and your organization.

Operating rooms generate up to 70% of a hospital’s total revenue, making them the most financially critical business units in healthcare. Yet managing them effectively relies on an incomplete data story. Traditionally, busy circulating nurses have been forced to navigate complex decision trees—handling barcode failures, scanning RFID tags, or manually searching incomplete item masters, while also caring for patients, supporting doctors, and interfacing with families. Because clinical priorities like patient safety, sterility, and room turnover naturally take precedence over clerical tasks, intraoperative documentation carries an overall error rate as high as 17%, climbing to over 38% when delayed. This documentation gap represents direct margin loss, as high-value implants, tissues and supplies routinely go unrecorded and unbilled. 

To mitigate this data integrity gap, hospitals have historically “band-aided” the problem with parallel paper records or bolt-on, additive point solutions. These manual workarounds fail to solve the foundational issue, and leave backend Al-powered dashboards to analyze a structurally unreliable foundation of inputs. Instead of relieving the already high cognitive burden of clinical teams, these tools increase the risk of error and potentially take attention away from the most important people in the OR: the patients.

Seeking to address these long-standing inefficiencies, several health systems in the last year have moved away from patchwork legacy systems to AssistIQ’s computer vision capture platform. AssistIQ shifts the nursing role from manual, in-case data entry to expert verification and oversight. Items are recognized automatically in real-time as they are opened even when they are not in the hospital ERP item master, capturing over 98% of supplies, implants, and tissues while removing manual work for clinicians.

This practical implementation of AI eliminates the tedious “busy work” of manual tracking, allowing nurses to refocus on patient care while drastically strengthening the hospital’s bottom line. Early deployments have demonstrated transformative operational and financial outcomes. Join industry leaders with hands-on experience in a discussion moderated by AssistIQ’s Director of Customer Delivery, Amy Brown, MHA, as they share their real-world journeys from documentation fatigue and data gaps to automated data integrity and more time spent focusing on what matters most: the patient.  

Learning objectives:

• Analyze the limits of legacy workflows: Understand why traditional OR and procedural documentation workflows, such as barcode scanning and manual entry, lead to high error rates and structural data gaps.
• Implement practical AI for clinical efficiency: Discover how computer vision capture acts as a practical clinical tool to automate busy work, moving the nurse’s role from manual data entry to expert verification without changing professional accountability.
• Quantify financial and operational outcomes: Review relevant data from AssistIQ partners to examine how automated capture impacts contribution margin and waste recovery with visibility for perioperative, supply chain and revenue integrity teams. Hear from industry leaders with hands-on experience about outcomes they have seen inside a few months.
• Improve patient safety and workforce satisfaction: Identify how eliminating the intraoperative documentation burden frees up time for technicians, nurses and other teams while unlocking precise, real-time data necessary for quality and efficiency.
• Differentiate True Infrastructure from “Bolt-on” Solutions: Evaluate why additive dashboards and point solutions fail to resolve OR data integrity issues when layered over incomplete inputs.

Explore real-world solutions shared by your peers. Poster Presentations offer a chance to connect directly with researchers, ask questions, and learn how teams are addressing staffing, efficiency, safety, and performance challenges in their own organizations.

Submit a poster presentation proposal at www.periopleader.com/posters

Review and evaluate three posters to earn one additional CE credit while gaining practical ideas you can adapt to your setting.

Stop by, start a conversation, and leave with insights you can put into action.

Are you ready to compete for prizes and glory in Periop Leader Week’s game show for ASC leaders? Prepare to test your acumen in legal, regulatory and compliance issues during this interactive event.

Your host will ask a series of multiple-choice questions on these topics that you’ll anonymously answer right on your phone. We’ll not only keep score to award prizes, but you also might learn a thing or two about avoiding some critical administrative errors and blind spots that could make or break your ASC. After each question, there will be a brief discussion led by ASC experts Beverly Kirchner and Nyleen Flores about the correct answer, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask questions about each answer, making this competition a great learning experience as well.

Don’t miss this hour of fun, education, connection and (as we wish for every player in this competition) winning!

Learning objectives:

• Recognize common legal, regulatory, and compliance pitfalls in ASC operations by identifying high-risk scenarios and frequent administrative errors that can expose ASCs to citations, penalties, or litigation
• Differentiate correct vs. incorrect responses to real-world compliance scenarios by applying knowledge of key regulations and standards, including those from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and The Joint Commission, to select appropriate actions in case-based questions
• Apply practical strategies to mitigate risk and strengthen compliance programs by translating insights from game scenarios into actionable steps that improve policy adherence, documentation practices, and overall regulatory readiness.

Block utilization is the leading indicator for OR success in terms of revenue and productivity. In this session, you'll learn how Baylor University Medical Center (BUMC), faced with limited OR capacity due to ongoing construction and anesthesia/staffing resource constraints, is using analytics to expand OR access and improve block utilization in preparation for a consistent 4-5% yearly increase in surgical volume.

Driven by renewed alignment between OR leadership and physician champions, BUMC increased its minimum block utilization requirement in its OR scheduling guidelines thanks to its newly redesigned Power BI Analytics & Intelligence (A&I) dashboard, which provides greater visibility of opportunities with underutilized blocks to generate individualized recommendations for surgeons and clinic staff. Targeted clinic education and change management for over 100 active surgeon and group blocks at BUMC resulted in block utilization improvement for its two ORs -- one improved from 53% to 68%, while the other improved from 58% to 74%.

Mr. Ladines will additionally discuss future efforts to improve OR access outside of block utilization improvements, including the use of predictive modeling to evaluate efficiencies gained using an Intuitive DV5 robotic system instead of the XI system, improvements in turnover times between flip rooms, and optimization of same-day discharge capacity and hospital throughput. He'll also highlight snapshots of the Power BI dashboard that his health system uses to drive decision-making for several operational metrics beyond block utilization.

Ample interactive discussion will follow Mr. Ladines' case study, so come loaded with your questions about OR analytics!

Learning objectives:

• Explain how block utilization functions as a leading indicator of OR revenue and productivity.
• Demonstrate how actionable OR analytics can be used to identify underutilized blocks, support guideline changes, and drive surgeon‑ and clinic‑level behavior change resulting in measurable improvements in block utilization.
• Evaluate additional data‑driven strategies to expand OR access beyond block optimization, including predictive modeling for robotic platform efficiency, turnover time reductions in flip rooms, and optimization of same‑day discharge capacity and hospital throughput.

As health systems grow and merge, nurse leaders are often at the center of a familiar challenge: making one set of standards work across many unique settings. What looks good on paper at the system level can quickly become confusing or even unworkable for perioperative nurses as they care for patients. The drive for standardization can collide with local realities, leading to confusion, implementation barriers, and the potential for the adoption of policies that do not acknowledge site-specific operational constraints. Ambiguity around acceptable local variation can inadvertently lead to the normalization of deviation — where informal, unsanctioned practices become routine and potentially compromise safety and quality for the perioperative patients we serve.

This session will explore common barriers and pitfalls that can undermine successful practice standardization across diverse perioperative care settings. Participants will identify factors that contribute to deviation from standardized procedures and examine the risks associated with poor alignment between system-level expectations and frontline realities. Strategies will be discussed for developing high-quality, evidence-based standards that are flexible enough to accommodate local needs while maintaining system-wide consistency and safety.

Through case examples and practical guidance, perioperative leaders will gain tools to foster collaboration between local and organizational leadership, ensuring that variations in practice are intentional, transparent, and aligned with evidence-based safety standards.

By promoting collaboration between organizational and local leaders, perioperative nurse leaders can ensure that practice variation is deliberate, clearly communicated, and aligned with both operational realities and patient safety goals.

Surgical services leaders work in one of the most intense and high-stakes environments in health care. Every decision, tone, and reaction can affect patient outcomes, staff morale, and overall team performance. This presentation explores how emotional regulation and emotional intelligence directly influence leadership effectiveness, communication, and culture in the operating room.

Through real-world examples, attendees will learn to identify emotional triggers, understand the science behind emotional response, and apply practical techniques to remain composed during high-pressure situations. The session reinforces the principle that “when you lose your composure, you lose your leadership,” and demonstrates how emotionally aware leadership fosters trust, stability, and improved operational results.

This session offers practical, evidence-based approaches to emotional regulation for leaders in surgical services. It bridges leadership psychology and real-world perioperative challenges to help leaders build stronger, more resilient teams capable of thriving under pressure.

 Learning objectives:

• Identify common emotional triggers in high-intensity surgical settings.
• Understand the link between emotional intelligence, credibility, and team performance.
• Apply strategies to maintain composure and make clear decisions under stress.
• Strengthen leadership presence and team trust through emotional self-awareness.

Hospitals and health systems see the writing on the wall: The future of most surgical procedures, especially elective surgeries, is in the outpatient setting. As such, they are looking to build new ASCs, purchase existing ASCs, or establish joint ventures with ASCs and, in some cases, ASC management companies. What does this massive migration of capital and resources mean to the leaders of ASCs that are entering joint ventures with larger entities? In this interactive panel discussion, leaders from across the spectrum will examine the accelerating trend of ASC joint ventures through the ASC administrator’s lens.

The overwhelming hype of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be touching every aspect of contemporary healthcare. Perioperative services are not immune from the promise of improved efficiencies in human resources, supply chain management and case throughput.

While the AI hype is real, its true potential remains uncertain. Can AI really improve processes, enhance patient outcomes, and improve overall efficiencies today?

Many perioperative services leaders may struggle with understanding fact from fiction in AI deployment. Many also have rational concerns about safety issues, costs and potential disruption that AI deployment may bring. This highly interactive session discusses real-world potential AI applications while addressing their fundamental pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Presenter Leslie Jebson isn't an informatics guru or AI evangelist; he's a perioperative and operations executive who understands your concerns and knowledge gaps surrounding AI and is ready to address them from your perspective. He’ll provide an objective overview of how to effectively review, select and implement AI solutions into perioperative services. Through real-world examples and case studies, Mr. Jebson will highlight the ways in which AI technologies such as machine learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing, and robotic systems may be applied to support clinical decision-making, optimize resource allocation and enhance patient safety. He'll also discuss the challenges you'll face in implementing these technologies.

Attending perioperative leadership community members will gain a vendor-agnostic understanding of the many AI tools that can be (and are being) used in perioperative services. 

Come loaded with questions for this interactive session with a periop leader who's experienced and knowledgeable about the pros and cons of AI in surgery!

Learning objectives:

• Define AI and its role in the healthcare industry, specifically within perioperative services.
• Discuss the challenges and strategies for integrating AI into existing perioperative workflows.
• Analyze current real-world applications of AI in perioperative services and distinguish these from speculative or exaggerated claims.

A piece of equipment breaking down – or worse, an inability to find or secure needed equipment for a scheduled surgery – can throw a wrench into day-to-day operations and workflow and impact revenue as well as create negative patient and surgeon experiences. In too many facilities, there’s only a vague notion of the age, location, maintenance schedule and availability of the equipment needed to perform any given surgery safely and on-time.

In this panel discussion, perioperative leaders coming from different perspectives will discuss the value and importance of having immediate visibility into the status of your surgical equipment fleet, including reducing cancelations and delays, maintaining optimal workflow, ensuring preventative maintenance to reduce breakdowns and malfunctions, making more informed scheduling decisions, planning for new equipment purchases with the right internal stakeholders and external partners, and more.

Reshaping a perioperative ecosystem can be a daunting task, and opening new or renovated perioperative spaces presents both significant risk and a powerful opportunity to embed quality and patient safety from the ground up. This session shares real‑world lessons learned from opening three separate operating room locations and two fully outfitted sterile processing locations over a four‑year period, viewed through an integrated quality and safety lens. Participants will explore how aligning design, workflows, and activation planning across sterile processing and the operating room can reduce system vulnerability and support reliable, safe surgical care. Through practical examples, the presentation highlights strategies used to proactively identify and mitigate risk before go‑live, strengthen multidisciplinary collaboration, and sustain quality outcomes after activation. Attendees will leave with actionable insights they can apply when planning, renovating, or expanding perioperative spaces—ensuring team readiness from decontamination to incision.

Learning objectives:

• Explain how aligning operating room and sterile processing design, workflows, and activation planning improves patient safety and reduces system risk across the surgical continuum.
• Describe practical quality and safety strategies used during OR and sterile processing openings to proactively identify and mitigate risks before go‑live.
• Apply lessons learned from opening multiple perioperative spaces to strengthen multidisciplinary collaboration, standardization, and sustained quality outcomes after activation.

Efficient operating room workflows and metrics are essential to ensuring timely surgical access for patients, and Jefferson Health-Lehigh Region continues to strengthen its capabilities in this area through focused, data-driven management. By leveraging Epic functionalities for automatic block releases, optimizing primetime and block utilization, updating policies and procedures, and proactively managing volume and case flow, we are able to harness available surgical time across our locations.

Through its active management dashboard, Jefferson Health-Lehigh Region perioperative leaders gain daily visibility into surgical volume projections for each campus by service line. The Epic functionalities that are activated allow for insight, clarity and awareness into a multitude of key metrics, such as released/filled OR time, primetime utilization, underutilized block, block management trends, and add-on capacity.

Learn how this transparent, real-time approach is enabling and supporting informed decision-making, improved coordination across perioperative teams, and site of care optimization.

Learning objectives:

• Master the art of optimizing operating room utilization through strategic block management, primetime optimization, and proactive case flow coordination: transforming underused time into meaningful patient care opportunities.
• Elevate perioperative performance through continuous visibility and action by leveraging dynamic forecasting tools and service-line insights to streamline scheduling, enhance throughput, and drive systemwide site-of-care work.
• Strengthen perioperative performance through centralized governance and seamless communication by aligning a dedicated management team with shared real-time data, which enables proactive decision-making, improved collaboration across campuses, and more efficient use of surgical resources.

This open discussion, led by two veteran ASC administrators, will provide ASC leaders a chance to work through and connect around common problems and challenges they face together. Call it a gripe session, a communal support group, a summit meeting… if you’re an ASC leader looking for sympathy, empathy, validation, peer connection and solutions to problems that have been vexing you, you’ll find it here.

Today’s perioperative teams are more diverse than ever, and that diversity can lead to team-damaging conflicts, misunderstandings, resentments and prejudices. As a perioperative leader, how can you overcome those interpersonal issues to build strong, harmonious, respectful, productive teams that truly focus and collaborate to provide consistently superior patient care?

This presentation is directed toward both new and experienced perioperative clinical leaders who are faced with interpersonal conflicts, staff retention concerns and productivity issues in the workplace. Among the issues Ms. Hickman will address are the divergent work ethics and personalities of Baby Boomer, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha staff, which can present challenges centered on stereotypes, technology gaps, communication styles and, essentially, how different staff members view the very nature of their work and each other.

During this highly interactive session, Ms. Hickman will present real-life scenarios and achievable strategies that can help leaders manage diverse staff, improve relationships, inspire motivation, and drive measurable and sustainable results in the day-to-day work environment.

Learning objectives:

• Identify challenges leaders face when leading clinical professionals
• Define four key areas of focus that leaders should consider when designing and building a team
• Provide evidence-based examples of managing cultural diversity, work-life balance and generational differences.

Freestanding ASCs face an uphill battle compared to large hospitals and health systems in securing favorable terms with payors and vendors. How can ASC leaders boost their negotiation skills and results? A panel of experts tackles that existential profitability issue to give ASC leaders tactics and strategies that can bring higher reimbusement rates and lower equipment prices to surgery centers.

One of the most common impediments to operational efficiency and a cohesive workplace culture in perioperative services is a disconnected or dysfunctional relationship between the OR and the sterile processing department. In this lively and interactive panel discussion, leaders will discuss how to establish and build stronger relationships among staff and leadership in these two vital areas of surgery.

Drowning in data? Nonplussed by numbers? At a loss with analytics? Your peers are here to help! Discuss the truly important metrics that periop business leaders should be tracking -- and using to make crucial decisions -- in this spirited peer-to-peer roundtable discussion.

Get insight on who and what you should be benchmarking your facility’s performance against, a better understanding of what your dashboards and reports are telling you, how to flow the right data to senior leadership, and much more.

If you’re struggling with what to do with all of your data, how to interpret it, and how to put it into action at your facility, this session provides a great chance to speak in person with your peers and form relationships you can rely upon as periop business leaders swim resolutely forward in an ever-deepening ocean of data.

In an era of dashboards and algorithms, the fastest way to safer care and smoother discharges is still a chair at the bedside. This session will show perioperative leaders how brief, purposeful sit-down rounds and eye-level conversations that center empathy and teach-back deliver outcomes technology alone cannot achieve: stronger trust, clearer understanding, reduced preventable harm, and confident discharge readiness across pre-op and PACU. Participants will leave this session ready to link behaviors to metrics and pair AI with the one thing only humans provide: meaningful connection that improves outcomes.

Learning objectives:

• Explore how Commit to Sit-Safety Sit Down practices build trust, improve understanding, and support safer, faster discharge.

• Describe how the integration of these human practices reduces safety events and discharge barriers while improving patient understanding and experience.

• Explain how Commit to Sit-Safety Sit Down practices can positively impact overall satisfaction of patients, families, and teams.

Many ASCs, unlike hospitals, develop a "family"-like culture, with ownership, leadership and staff interacting, covering for each other and working closely together Mondays through Fridays. While that convivial familiarity can engender productive collaboration and efficiency, it also can have its downsides, especially when someone acts out of line. In particular, most ASCs lack the disciplinary and security infrastructure and support that a hospital has.

In this interactive peer-to-peer roundtable discussion, ASC leaders will compare notes and discuss how they handle crises with team members and patients alike, including abusive physician-owners in the OR; drug-diverting staff; violence by patients, caregivers or team members; heated arguments and disagreements among staff; and more.

Join an expert panel for this interactive discussion on how to identify and address bottlenecks such as slow discharges and other inefficiencies in the patient experience that are weighing down your bottom line.

Preparing for an accreditation survey involves more than knowing the standards—it requires understanding what surveyors are observing in practice and where organizations most often fall short. As Joint Commission Accreditation 360 and CMS survey processes continue to evolve, perioperative leaders must be ready to demonstrate safe, reliable care across the entire surgical continuum.

This dynamic, interactive session provides an inside look at the issues surveyors are focusing on today, from preoperative assessment and the operating room to post-anesthesia care and discharge. Participants will explore the most frequently cited perioperative findings, discuss common pitfalls that lead to survey deficiencies, and learn practical strategies to strengthen compliance, improve patient safety, and enhance operational performance.

Designed for leaders responsible for perioperative quality and regulatory readiness, this session incorporates real-world survey experiences, case-based discussions, audience participation, and actionable takeaways that can be implemented immediately. Attendees will leave with greater confidence, practical tools, and a roadmap for building a culture of continuous survey readiness.

Learning objectives:

• Recognize current survey priorities and the most frequently cited perioperative findings during Joint Commission Accreditation 360 and CMS surveys.
• Implement practical strategies to strengthen regulatory compliance, reduce risk, and improve patient safety throughout the perioperative continuum.
• Develop a proactive survey readiness plan using tracer methodologies, leadership rounding, and multidisciplinary engagement to sustain continuous accreditation readiness.

Partnerships with your educator and nursing professional development (NPD) can benefit perioperative leaders, staff, and patients. We'll explore how to develop this partnership and examine the types of projects that can be developed for success, including:

• Implementing residency/fellowship programs to address staffing needs
• Improving onboarding of new staff
• Enhancing staff competencies through novel educational strategies
• Encouraging staff development by providing them resources and coaching to improve their education and certification
• Improving patient outcomes through implementation of evidence-based guidelines
• Developing novel communication strategies to ensure consistent messaging
• Driving culture and perioperative outcomes

When it comes to optimizing surgical services, the role of the sterile processing department (SPD) can often be overlooked or minimized -- as can investment in this critical area of perioperative services. Opportunities for significant savings and efficiencies abound, however, and they can hide in plain sight in your SPD -- if you know where to look.

Our expert panel will explore those opportunities, including more efficient turnovers, smarter SPD staffing, the cost- and time-saving power of instrument tray rationalization, better documentation and tracking of instrument trays (incuding loaners), safer instrument transport methods, the economics of reusable versus single-use instruments, building dedicated central sterile facilities or using third-party sterile processing services, and more.

If senior leadership at your facility views SPD as an expense rather than an asset, this panel will send you home with powerful counterarguments!

Preparing for an accreditation survey involves more than knowing the standards—it requires understanding what surveyors are observing in practice and where organizations most often fall short. As Joint Commission Accreditation 360 and CMS survey processes continue to evolve, perioperative leaders must be ready to demonstrate safe, reliable care across the entire surgical continuum.

This dynamic, interactive session provides an inside look at the issues surveyors are focusing on today, from preoperative assessment and the operating room to post-anesthesia care and discharge. Participants will explore the most frequently cited perioperative findings, discuss common pitfalls that lead to survey deficiencies, and learn practical strategies to strengthen compliance, improve patient safety, and enhance operational performance.

Designed for leaders responsible for perioperative quality and regulatory readiness, this session incorporates real-world survey experiences, case-based discussions, audience participation, and actionable takeaways that can be implemented immediately. Attendees will leave with greater confidence, practical tools, and a roadmap for building a culture of continuous survey readiness.

Learning objectives:

• Recognize current survey priorities and the most frequently cited perioperative findings during Joint Commission Accreditation 360 and CMS surveys.
• Implement practical strategies to strengthen regulatory compliance, reduce risk, and improve patient safety throughout the perioperative continuum.
• Develop a proactive survey readiness plan using tracer methodologies, leadership rounding, and multidisciplinary engagement to sustain continuous accreditation readiness.

What numbers should perioperative clinical and operational leaders be tracking, analyzing, and using to make decisions? Which measurements are truly the most important for perioperative leaders to track, and which aren’t so important? How do you assemble, access, view and analyze this data? This session will take you behind the numbers!

Infection prevention and sterile processing are crucial to patient safety, but relationships between these two disciplines within surgical facilities can often be strained, inequitable or poorly developed. In this session, learn from leaders on both sides of the aisle as they describe how to strengthen communication and collaboration between these two vital departments.

The majority of ASCs remain physician-owned. For many of those surgeons whose surgery centers are their crowning career achievements, their facilities’ operations bear their unique stamp. But when your ASC’s surgeon-owner is retiring, considering retirement, or slowing down, who’s next in line to take their place?

This lively, interactive panel discussion will address ownership succession planning at an ASC. Panelists will focus on how to prepare your ASC’s next physician-owner to take the reins … as well as how to prepare your staff and yourself for the change.

Learning objectives:

• Evaluate key considerations in ASC ownership succession planning by examining legal, financial, and governance factors involved in transitioning surgeon-ownership, including equity structures, partnership agreements, and continuity of operations
• Identify strategies to develop and prepare future surgeon-owner leaders by exploring approaches for mentoring, leadership development, and readiness assessment to ensure incoming physician-owners are equipped to manage both clinical and business responsibilities
• Apply change management principles to support a smooth leadership transition by discussing methods to align staff, maintain culture, and minimize operational disruption during ownership transitions while preserving quality, compliance, and financial stability.

Managing limited resources and staff? Struggling with recruitment and retention of nurses, techs, anesthesia, surgeons and other key roles in surgical services? Short on the equipment and supplies that you need to provide safe, efficient, on-time surgical care? You're not alone. Get insight and advice from this panel of your peers -- and share your own -- on how to do more with less, how to pivot to rapidly changing staffing conditions, and how to keep your surgical services running and optimized when resources are tight.