About
Idle rooms, rigid block schedules, manual workflows, and limited visibility into available OR time are challenges that perioperative leaders across the country are navigating every day. The question is: what does it actually look like when a team solves them?

In this one-hour session, leaders from three health systems share their stories directly: the operational problems they were facing, what they changed, and the results that followed.

You’ll hear from:
• Melanie Burgess, VP of Perioperative Services at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, on how her team replaced fragmented scheduling workflows with real-time OR visibility and data-driven block conversations, growing case volume by 8% without expanding physical infrastructure.
• Jay de los Reyes, COO of McLaren Greater Lansing, on how a 13-hospital system moved from stagnant utilization and 390,000 minutes of unused block time to a 6X return on investment.
• And from San Juan Regional Medical Center, CIO John Gaede and Physician Informatics Executive Carlo Hallak, MD, share how a rural community hospital serving the Four Corners region achieved a 2X ROI in just 90 days after replacing manual, Excel-driven OR tracking with real-time scheduling and capacity tools.

These are peer conversations: candid, specific, and grounded in the realities of running surgical services today.
When
Wednesday, October 21, 2026 · 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time (US & Canada) (GMT -4:00)
Presenters
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Joe Paone
Content Director, Healthcare, Periop Leader Network | Access Intelligence
Joe Paone is content director of Periop Leader Network and Periop Leader Week, both of which he joined in November 2025. Previously, he served as senior editor of AORN’s Outpatient Surgery Magazine from 2019 to 2025. Prior to entering the healthcare sector, he covered consumer electronics and information technology for numerous publications.
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Melanie B. Burgess
Vice President Perioperative Services and Executive Director of the Center for Perioperative Medicine, The University of Tennessee Medical Center
Melanie B. Burgess oversees the strategy, management, operations, and financial performance of all perioperative and endoscopy services at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, a 715-bed hospital and the only Level I Trauma Center serving East Tennessee, Southeast Kentucky, and Western North Carolina. Under her leadership, UT Medical Center operates 36 operating rooms, a hospital-based ambulatory surgery centers, an Endoscopy Center, and three JV ASCs, serving over 28,000 surgical procedures annually. Ms. Burgess holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Furman University and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Pennsylvania State University.
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Jay E. de los Reyes, MSHA, MBA
Chief Operating Officer, McLaren Greater Lansing
Jay E. De Los Reyes, MSHA, MBA serves as Chief Operating Officer at McLaren Greater Lansing, where he has championed operational excellence and data-driven decision-making across perioperative services. He is passionate about leveraging innovation and collaborative partnerships to unlock operational capacity, enhance surgeon satisfaction, and improve patient access to timely surgical care.
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Carlo Hallak, MD
Physician Informatics Executive, San Juan Regional Medical Center
Dr. Carlo Hallak serves as Physician Informatics Executive at San Juan Regional Medical Center, where he bridges clinical operations and health IT to drive digital transformation. With his dual perspective as both a physician and informatics leader, Dr. Hallak has championed data-driven operational improvements across multiple health systems throughout his career. At SJRMC, he led the successful implementation of iQueue for Operating Rooms through rigorous data validation and physician engagement.
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John Gaede, CPHIMS, MLS (ASCP)
Chief Information Officer, San Juan Regional Medical Center
John Gaede serves as Chief Information Officer at San Juan Regional Medical Center, bringing a unique frontline healthcare perspective from his background as a former laboratory medical technologist. As CIO, he champions a “save lives and innovate” philosophy while leading the organization’s digital transformation initiatives, including bringing IT operations back in-house and managing multiple concurrent technology implementations. His partnership with clinical leadership has been instrumental in driving rapid technology adoption and operational excellence across SJRMC.
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