This thesis consists of three papers studying the effect of surgical teams on operating room (OR) efficiency. The overarching motivation of this thesis is to enhance the efficiency of surgical teams in hospital ORs by examining the underlying factors that influence surgical procedure duration. Recognizing the complexity of surgical operations, our research is driven by the hypothesis that both the interpersonal dynamics among surgical team members and the individual competencies of the surgical staff play critical roles in the efficiency of surgical procedures. We aim to provide actionable insights that could inform OR scheduling practices and nurse assignment strategies, ultimately leading to improved patient care and hospital efficiency. The first paper (Chapter 2) is titled “More Familiarity in Surgical Teams Leads to Shorter Procedure Time”. We address the need to move beyond the mere correlation between team familiarity and surgical efficiency to explore a causal relationship. This investigation stems from the understanding that enhanced team dynamics, particularly familiarity among team members, can potentially shorten surgery times. Our study aims to fill a significant gap in existing research by extending this analysis across an entire hospital’s surgical portfolio and employing advanced statistical models to explore a causal link. The second paper (Chapter 3) is titled “Dissecting the Multidimensional Impact of Nursing Experience on Surgical Efficiency”. This paper shifts focus from team dynamics to the individual capabilities of nursing staff, specifically examining their past surgical experiences and the transferability of expertise across diverse specialties and procedures. By dissecting nurses’ past experiences in detail and understanding how different aspects of these experiences impact the efficiency of surgical procedures, our goal is to lay the groundwork to help determine nurses’ suitability for particular surgical assignments, thereby enhancing the allocation of nursing staff to surgical teams. To our knowledge, this study represents the first systematic analysis of surgical nurses’ experience using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding system as a framework and its effects on procedure duration. The third paper (Chapter 4) is titled “Temporal Patterns in Surgical Experience: Quantifying Skill Retention and Memory Decay”. This paper explores the temporal aspect of surgical expertise, recognizing that the relevance of past experiences diminishes over time. Driven by the necessity for a dynamic approach to nurse assignments that acknowledges skill decay, we measure the rate at which skills are forgotten. We then determine the lookback period for assessing past experiences so that nurse assignments can consider not only their total experience but also how recently and effectively they apply to current tasks. While the concepts of learning and forgetting have been widely researched across diverse fields, including healthcare, our study appears to be the first to investigate the temporal dynamics of specific aspects of surgical experience, such as performing procedures on specific body systems and utilizing the same surgical trays. Overall, the motivation for our research is to bring a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the factors affecting surgical team performance. By integrating the dimensions of team familiarity, individual experience, and the temporal dynamics of skills and memory, we aim to contribute to the field of surgical efficiency, offering hospitals practical, data-driven strategies to enhance their OR operations.