David
Schummers

The typical hospital operating room runs at 60% utilization. The other 40% is a story told in waiting - waiting for a room to turn over, for the previous patient to be moved, for the instrument count to be confirmed, for someone to track down the attending. It's expensive, it's exhausting, and until recently, it was invisible.

David Schummers built a camera to watch it all.

Apella's ambient AI platform uses computer vision to capture up to 14 distinct events in every surgical case - patient in, patient out, instrument ready, room clear - and writes structured data back to the electronic health record automatically. No manual logging. No chasing. No paperwork that waits until midnight to get done.

For Schummers, this isn't incremental improvement. It's what he calls the third era of surgical innovation: after open surgery gave way to minimally invasive robotics, data is now the frontier. The question isn't whether AI belongs in the OR - it's whether it's watching closely enough.

Schummers has a framework for where surgery has been and where it's going. Era One: open surgery, the cutting and repairing that defined medicine for centuries. Era Two: minimally invasive surgery and robotics - the laparoscope, the da Vinci, Auris's Monarch - fundamentally reshaping how procedures are performed.

Era Three is data-driven surgical innovation. Not a better robot, not a smaller incision - a smarter room. Systematic measurement enabling systematic improvement. It's the thesis he published in 2021 and has been executing ever since.

He writes regularly for MedCity News and Medical Economics, arguing that ambient AI isn't a feature - it's a fundamental shift in how hospitals can manage their most expensive and consequential real estate. His essays tackle OR utilization, clinician burnout, EHR documentation burden, and the near-term future of AI in healthcare delivery.

Fifty percent of clinician time, by some estimates, goes to documentation and communications rather than care. That's the problem Apella exists to solve - and the mission that's driven Schummers since Apella's first day in October 2019.