OR Efficiencies Team of Specialists

Sharon K. Graves, RN, BS, MA

Senior Clinical Director - Leadership Development, Nursing, and Perioperative Services Operations Improvement

Sharon's Graves' career spans 34 years in Healthcare with ten years as a Chief Nurse Executive with responsibilities including Patient Care Services, Perioperative Services and Clinical Operations. Sharon's career includes fifteen years in hospital operations improvements as a senior consultant with major companies such as VHA, Inc. and Johnson & Johnson Healthcare Systems.

Sharon's consulting expertise emphasizes leadership for efficiency improvements and best practices in areas of nursing/patient care, quality improvement, perioperative services, benchmarking, labor productivity /staffing and redesign of work flow processes. She began her consulting career in revenue cycle management and quality documentation with case management. Her leadership skills in training and team-work have always been a key strategy for Sharon in working with physicians and staff to change culture and processes.

Sharon is nationally known throughout the VHA Inc. consortium network of hospitals for her ability to produce cost efficiencies, improve surgeon and anesthesia satisfaction through effective scheduling and to improve quality patient flow throughout the perioperative services. Customizing strategies for improvement is not an issue for Sharon; she has work with hospitals with only three ORs in Louisiana to hospitals with 34 ORs in Philadelphia as well as hospitals with multispecialty physician groups to meet the needs of all customers.

Sharon's significant experiences and accomplishments include the following:

Leadership and Financial Management

• Responsibly managed budgets over 100M in Revenues and 40M in expenses.
• Responsible for over 700 hospital clinical employees and physician practices.
• Reduced salary budgets from 2 M to 10 million
• Improved revenues by ten percent two years consecutively through improved surgical scheduling practices.
• Led teams for non-salary cost reductions through product standardization and decreased inventories.
• Reengineering and work redesign of clinical services, which enabled the hospital to expand its major product lines.
• Education, supervisory and Project over-site for 34 consultants.
• Published in "Surgical Services Management" for Cost Containment Processes; July 1996

Professional Association Involvement

• American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE)
• Tennessee Organization of Nurse Executives (TONE) , Treasure
• Association of Operating Nurses (AORN)