April 7, 2026
The overwhelming hype of artificial intelligence (AI) is touching every aspect of healthcare, and perioperative services are not immune. While the AI hype is real, its true potential remains uncertain, as are its promises of improved efficiencies in human resources, supply chain management and case throughput.
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.
During a highly interactive session at October’s Periop Leader Week in Savannah, Ga., Leslie Jebson, MHA, MBA, FACHE, FACMPE, system administrator for The Orthopedics & Sports Medicine Institute/Outpatient Rehabilitation with Prisma Health, will discuss the real-world potential of AI applications while addressing their fundamental pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Mr. 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, vendor-agnostic overview of how to effectively review, select and implement AI solutions into perioperative services.
Through real-world examples and case studies, he’ll 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.
We recently spoke with Mr. Jebson about his upcoming session.
Why should the perioperative leadership community attend your session at Periop Leader Week?
There is an inordinate amount of news and hype about AI in healthcare. I remain keen to adopt technological solutions that can meaningfully enhance patient care. You’ll walk away with objective insights for how to navigate the AI landscape and determine if, and in what ways, you may want to incorporate AI in your workplace.
Are you an AI evangelist? A tech guru? An IT professional? A relentless early adopter?
I’m not a renowned expert or authority on AI. I’m an operations administrator who represents 1,000 employees and 200 physicians. We’re a busy operation, and I’m looking to AI to make their days better. I’ve been dealing with AI, and I’ll present some potential solutions and talk about some mistakes that I have made that you should avoid.
The innovation adoption cycle is a bell curve. You’ll hear the term “early adopters,” who are in the top 10 percentile. Then you have the mainstream, and then you have what is called the laggards. People always assume I’m an innovator or early adopter, but I’ll say, “I don’t know, do I have an Oura ring? Do I have Meta glasses?” I don’t have any of that. I would not call myself an early adopter, but I’m generally not a laggard either. I’m more in the, “Let me see, does the function follow the hype?” group. Most importantly, can we deploy a new solution for enhancing care for the patient and provider?
We could literally talk for hours on end about AI and the massive disruption involved. What I want to do is give a “diet coke” version of the pros and cons of AI, what’s possible with AI and what else to consider about it for the periop leadership community members who attend and participate in my session. My goal is to objectively discuss real-world solutions like ambient AI that takes dictation from the surgeon talking through the case, employee motion camera systems that know who’s in the OR, preoperative phone calls and patient communications, and so on.
We’ll also examine the business side of the AI equation. You can go down financial rabbit holes with custom AI deployments that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase, customize and deploy. The question is, what do you gain? If the ROI is seven years, does it really make sense to implement it now? What’s the cost of the software build going to be versus the ROI?
You’ll have some PowerPoint slides and will open with a brief presentation, but you also stress the interactivity of your presentations. What can perioperative leaders expect from your session?
I really enjoy sharing timely topics with colleagues. I’m blessed to be adjunct faculty at several universities and have participated in a slew of interactive learning experiences over my career. I like sharing ideas and, selfishly, I love picking up ideas from the people who attend and participate in my sessions.
My perspective is, let’s move forward on this together. I’ll want to hear what’s going on with AI on your end. Together, we’ll explore questions like, “What are some of the important considerations for deploying AI? What will AI do to workflows? How is AI going to augment what we do perioperatively and make things better for providers and patients?”
It’ll be a practical discussion about the technology, the pros and cons. There are certainly drawbacks and risks with AI, and we’ll address those, such as privacy and managing information.
You don’t need to adopt AI for the sake of adopting AI. What you should do is ask, “How can AI meaningfully help me and my colleagues be more efficient or make my staff less burdened? If I use my smart phone camera to shoot a picture of a surgical tray and AI tells me what’s missing, isn’t that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?”
What do you hope members of the perioperative leadership community will take back to their facilities from your session?
If you take one good idea away from our conversation over the hour we’ll spend together, I’ll view my time with you as a success. And I’ll also gain ideas from you that I didn’t think of before! Isn’t that the core reason why we come together at national meetings of this kind?
