Operating Room (OR) managers face a rapidly evolving landscape characterized by increasing surgical volumes, rapid technological advancements, staffing challenges, and growing safety demands. Navigating these shifts is essential to maintaining safe, efficient and high-performing ORs.
Wondering how to improve OR efficiency in hospitals in 2026? It starts with understanding the most pressing shifts in surgical operations and the 2026 trends in surgical services management.
Here are the key developments shaping Operating Room management — and don’t miss the infographic at the end summarizing the data driving change across hospitals nationwide:
1. Rising Surgical Volumes and Demographic Drivers
The demand for surgical procedures has grown significantly over the past two decades. Between 2000 and 2020, the U.S. experienced a 31.5% increase in overall surgical volume, far outpacing the 18% population growth during the same time. This upward trend is expected to continue. In 2024, approximately 113 million surgical procedures were performed in the United States. General surgery procedures in the U.S. increased by approximately 19% in 2024, following a 25% rise in 2023. The number is projected to rise steadily each year, reaching about 137.5 million procedures by 2030. This increase is driven by an aging population that needs more care, along with medical advances that enable less invasive procedures and faster recovery times.
Hospitals are feeling the pressure to do more with less: maximizing OR throughput without compromising safety or quality. As case volumes grow, even minor inefficiencies can ripple through the entire surgical schedule. The organizations rising to meet this moment are investing in smarter systems, stronger support models and collaborative partners to ease the burden on clinical teams.
Technological advances combined with evolving Medicare reimbursement policies continue to accelerate the shift toward outpatient surgeries. The COVID-19 pandemic further pushed healthcare systems to reduce inpatient stays where possible, boosting outpatient care volumes.
Medicare reimburses millions of outpatient procedures annually through a complex system reflecting the growing diversity of outpatient care. In 2016, the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) and Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) Payment System covered approximately 3,400 procedures, reflecting a diverse but focused set of outpatient services reimbursed for facilities. By 2025, the number of procedures eligible for reimbursement under OPPS/ASC has expanded significantly, with CMS approving more complex surgeries, such as joint replacements and cardiac procedures, for outpatient settings.
Ambulatory Surgical Centers (ASCs) are central to this trend. ASC procedure volume is projected to grow by 21% from 2024 to 2034, reaching 44 million cases. This surge is driven by a combination of clinical innovation, payer incentives, and patient preferences for the more convenient and lower-cost setting ASCs provide. As more complex procedures move into outpatient environments, ASCs will continue to play a key role in absorbing this growth.
To remain competitive and financially sustainable, hospitals need to remain agile by adopting cost-effective technologies such as telehealth and streamlined pre-op assessments. ASCs will continue to grow and absorb more outpatient volume. Hospitals must leverage these innovations—alongside operational efficiencies—to deliver high-quality surgical care, meet patient expectations, and manage costs in a rapidly evolving healthcare environment.
Staffing remains one of the most urgent challenges for OR leaders in 2025. In a recent survey, three out of five hospital leaders reported that staffing shortages are a substantial barrier to efficiency. These gaps span the entire perioperative team, from nurses and techs to sterile processing.
It’s no surprise that 77% of healthcare workers report feeling burned out, often due to short staffing and administrative overload. Burnout impacts morale and contributes to higher turnover rates. Hospitals face increasing pressure to find smarter, more sustainable ways to empower their teams.
The bottom line?
Strengthening your Operating Room starts with taking care of your people and providing them with the necessary resources needed. More hospitals are partnering closely with OR teams, outsourcing essential services such as sterile processing and supply chain management to ease the burden and allow staff to focus on what they do best: delivering safe, high-quality patient care.
When surgical volumes rise and teams are stretched thin, all it takes is one missed step in sterilization to result in serious consequences. Improperly processed surgical instruments can put a patient’s life at risk.
The Joint Commission reported that nearly 70% of immediate threat-to-life (ITL) incidents in hospitals stemmed from failures in sterilization or high-level disinfection. And with 1 in 31 patients acquiring a healthcare-associated infection, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The good news?
These risks are preventable. Protecting patients starts with consistency. This includes strict adherence to sterilization protocols—and partnering with experts who deliver that standard, day in and day out.
Increasingly, hospitals are turning to trusted partners who specialize in the reprocessing of surgical equipment. With the proper support, OR teams can stay focused on care, confident that every instrument is clean, safe, and ready for the next case.
At Surgical Solutions, our vision is simple: improve the lives of all those we serve. We understand every detail in the operating room matters, because every second matters. Imagine an OR where…
This is not just wishful thinking. It is achievable!
Surgical Solutions takes on those time-intensive tasks such as managing Operating Room equipment sterilization, improving OR efficiency and finding surgical workflow solutions so your staff can focus on providing exceptional patient care.
OR management in 2025 is more complex than ever. But complexity doesn’t always mean chaos. Every challenge opens the door to a smarter, stronger system. That’s where we come in. At Surgical Solutions, our support leads to real results:
We're proud to be recognized for our unwavering commitment to safety and quality. In 2025, we renewed our ISO 9001 certification and were honored by Healthcare Business Review as Top Sterile Processing Provider of 2025. These achievements reflect the dedication of our incredible team, all working together and pushing toward a common goal: helping Operating Rooms thrive.
Let’s get started. Contact Surgical Solutions today.
If you are looking into how to improve OR efficiency in an increasingly high-pressure environment, look no further than Surgical Solutions. You will gain a true partner dedicated to helping you reach your goals.
What is OR utilization and why does it matter?
Operating room utilization measures how efficiently a hospital uses its available OR time — typically expressed as the percentage of scheduled block hours actually used for surgical cases. A well-run OR generally targets 75 to 85 percent utilization. Below that range, the hospital is leaving revenue and capacity on the table. Above it, the department risks burning out staff and creating scheduling backlogs. Utilization is not just a financial metric. It reflects how well staffing, scheduling, sterile processing and instrument readiness are all working together... or not.
What are the most common causes of operating room case delays?
Most case delays trace back to a handful of preventable problems. Instrument and tray issues are among the top drivers: missing instruments, incomplete trays, or items returned from sterile processing with defects force last-minute scrambling, pushing first-case start times and ripples through the rest of the day. Staffing gaps, whether from turnover, call-outs, or inadequate float coverage, leave rooms without the personnel needed to set up and turn over efficiently. Equipment failures, particularly with loaner or aging instruments that lack centralized tracking, create the same problem. Scheduling mismatches, where case time is booked without accounting for actual setup and turnover requirements, compound everything. Research analyzing more than 67,000 OR cases found that the average OR runs at roughly $15 per minute in operational costs (See our blog post here: Top 5 Reasons You Have Case Delays), which means a 40-minute delay is not an inconvenience, it is a measurable financial event.
How can hospitals improve operating room utilization?
Improving OR utilization requires addressing the system, not just the symptoms. The most effective strategies tend to fall into four areas:
Scheduling accuracy: block time should reflect actual case duration data, not historical assumptions or surgeon preference.
First-case on-time starts: workflow disruptions, including missing instruments, miscommunication and inefficient room setups, account for roughly 20 percent of wasted OR time and most of that loss happens before the first incision. (See blog post here: Is Your Hospital Losing Hours Every Day?)
Turnover time: Room transitions between cases are where poorly coordinated staffing and instrument flow show up most visibly.
SPD alignment: the sterile processing department sets the pace for everything that follows. When instrument turnaround is slow or unreliable, no amount of scheduling optimization will close the gap.
What is the connection between sterile processing and OR delays?
Sterile processing is often treated as a back-of-house function, but its performance directly controls what happens in the OR. When trays are incomplete, instruments are missing, or reprocessing runs behind schedule, case start times move. Inefficient sterile processing is one of the leading causes of OR case delays (See post), and the effects compound across an entire surgical day, a delayed first case rarely recovers without sacrificing the afternoon schedule. Investing in SPD staffing, workflow standardization and instrument tracking is one of the highest-leverage moves a hospital can make to protect OR efficiency.
What does OR turnover time mean and how do you reduce it?
Turnover time is the interval between one patient leaving the OR and the next patient entering — the window during which the room is cleaned, restocked and set up for the next case. Industry benchmarks vary by case type, but most programs target 25 to 35 minutes for standard procedures. Reducing turnover time requires parallel workflows: cleaning, instrument delivery and room setup should happen simultaneously rather than sequentially. That demands clear role assignments, reliable instrument availability from SPD and a support model that keeps non-clinical tasks off clinical staff. Poorly coordinated workflows lead to longer-than-necessary room turnovers, which increase downtime between cases and push schedule delays later into the day. (Read our blog post)
How does OR staffing affect efficiency?
Three out of five hospital leaders report that staffing shortages are a substantial barrier to OR efficiency (Read our blog post), and the impact extends beyond headcount. High turnover means newer staff who are less familiar with protocols, which slows setup, increases errors and adds pressure to experienced team members who fill the gaps. Burnout accelerates attrition and creates a cycle that is difficult to break from the inside. Hospitals that stabilize OR and SPD staffing — particularly by reducing dependence on agency and travel contracts — tend to see measurable improvements in on-time starts, turnover times and case volume within a relatively short window.
What data should hospitals track to measure OR performance?
The most useful OR performance metrics combine scheduling data with operational outcomes. On-time first-case starts, average turnover time, case delay frequency and root cause, OR utilization by block and by service line, instrument filerback rates and tray defect rates — these tell a more complete story than utilization alone. The challenge for most hospitals is that this data lives in multiple systems and rarely surfaces in one place in real time. Centralizing it through a platform that connects scheduling, asset tracking and compliance reporting allows leadership to identify patterns before they become recurring problems, rather than reviewing them after the fact.
When should a hospital bring in outside help for OR management?
Outside support makes the most sense when internal teams can see the problems clearly but lack the bandwidth, staffing or objective vantage point to fix them. Recurring case delays despite internal process efforts, compliance gaps ahead of a Joint Commission survey, SPD turnover that undermines any stability the team builds, or a planned volume expansion that the current infrastructure cannot support — any of these are reasonable inflection points. Rising labor costs and declining reimbursement have made OR efficiency a financial priority for hospital leaders and the ROI case for bringing in a specialized partner is often easier to build than it looks once delay costs, overtime and turnover expenses are factored in.
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