That clinical background shapes how she thinks about the pressure OR teams are under, and what it actually takes to make meaningful operational change.
In a recent Becker's Healthcare podcast, Steele shared how Owensboro Health, a three-hospital rural system in Western Kentucky, approached three of those pressures head-on: rising supply costs, workflow constraints, and the documentation burden placed on surgical teams.
Owensboro Health serves eleven core counties in Western Kentucky, along with a much broader surrounding region. Like most health systems today, the organization is navigating real financial headwinds. And surgery is often where that pressure shows up most clearly.
Two challenges stood out.
The first was workforce: recruiting and retaining surgical staff in a competitive market, while making sure the workflows around them actually support the work they are being asked to do.
The second was supply cost. As inflation continues to drive up the price of OR supplies, any gap in capture accuracy has a direct and measurable impact on the bottom line. In the OR, documentation is not just an administrative task. It determines whether the health system has an accurate record of what was used, what should be billed, and what needs to be replenished.
What Steele emphasized most about Owensboro's AI-powered capture was not just the accuracy rate. It was the simplicity.
Circulating nurses place packaging in front of a camera, and the product is identified, documented in the EMR, and decremented from the supply system automatically. No barcodes. No manual entry. Nothing added to an already full case.
That matters because clinical teams have seen plenty of technology implementations that promised efficiency but added another step to the workflow. A tool that fits into the way nurses already work, instead of asking them to work around the tool, is different.
Nurses are not spending time at the end of a case documenting from memory. Charge capture teams are not trying to reconstruct what happened in the room after the fact. Supply chain is not making decisions from incomplete or delayed data. The information is captured at the point of use, when it is most accurate and most useful.
The impact showed up quickly across multiple areas.
Owensboro reached 99% supply and implant capture accuracy and saw a 12% increase in billable revenue. Monthly expired product waste dropped 48%, and inventory depletion errors fell 90% — meaning supply chain teams are working from accurate, real-time data rather than counts that lag behind what's actually been used.
That is the bigger story. Better documentation does not just improve charge capture. It changes what the organization can see and act on. When the data is accurate, teams can reduce waste, improve replenishment, protect revenue, and make better decisions about what is happening inside the OR.
Steele was clear that the technology alone did not drive the results. Her guiding principle for rollout was simple: get the right people involved early, and keep them involved.
That meant building scenarios with the team, asking for input on workflow improvements before go-live, and maintaining open communication across the vendor, internal teams, and EMR integration partners.
The vendor relationship mattered too.
That kind of partnership is often the difference between a tool that gets installed and a solution that actually gets adopted. Especially in surgical services, where workflows are complex and trust is earned through execution.
When asked what will separate future high-performing health systems, Steele pointed to the whole package: a culture where people want to work, quality and safety at the forefront, smart investment decisions, and operational excellence as the foundation for financial health.
For Owensboro Health, choosing to be an early mover on AI-powered capture was part of that broader operating philosophy. It was a deliberate bet that better data and less administrative friction would pay off for both the business and the people doing the work.
And that is the real takeaway. In the OR, the path to financial improvement does not start with asking clinical teams to do more. It starts with building workflows that make the right thing easier, capture the truth of what happened in the room, and give every team downstream the data they need to act.