Anesthesia is often overlooked as an area for potential improvement as ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) and physicians’ practices focus on providing better care at a more affordable price. But partnering with an experienced, growth-minded anesthesia group can offer opportunities to optimize this important function through management and clinical excellence, efficiency, and staffing expertise.
“Many ASC and physician practice leaders think anesthesia just needs to serve the patient population, and support the physicians,” says Chris Caldwell, Clinical Director of Anesthesia at CarePlus. “Often, they’re not actively evaluating the function, and they tend to stick with what they have because it’s comfortable. In our experience, they uncover opportunity when they start to ask questions like ‘Is this service really a good fit for me? Is this optimal in our environment operationally and for the patients? Can it be better?’”
Optimizing excellence
Until they answer such questions, ASCs often think their anesthesia departments are okay as is.
“As they learn more about what an anesthesia department can be, they realize just okay is not okay,” Caldwell says. “Optimal anesthesia management includes such functions as pre-op phone calls, helping with records requests and clearances, and managing and ordering drugs and supplies. If those functions are done with excellence, anesthesia is not a clock in, clock out experience.”
Leveraging a 7-year track record of success, CarePlus provides counsel on best practices and ensures its partner centers have broad clinical resources to deliver excellence every day. This approach keeps anesthesia departments from operating in a vacuum, ensures the function can support new specialties, and helps centers with utilization by being flexible enough to add additional days.
“Our goal is to supply and support an anesthesia team that will operationally fit, and facilitate, your clinical environment,” says Caldwell. “These efforts, coupled with management expertise gleaned through our work with the group of highly functional sites we’ve managed since 2011, can help maximize a center’s ability to generate revenue.”
Managing efficiency
Improvements in the anesthesia department led to enhanced efficiency, also reflecting directly to the bottom line.
“We’ve found having an anesthesia department that has data as a point of focus and a partner who is looking at that data daily for ways to improve contributes to the bigger picture of overall center efficiency,” Caldwell says. “And that’s an avenue that helps make our partners more profitable in the long run.”
Ensuring staff expertise
Finally, finding quality anesthesia providers is difficult, and centers are often afraid making a change will cause unwanted disruption. But optimizing staffing makes anesthesia reactive to the center’s needs – and not the other way around. By partnering with a leading anesthesia staffing company, CarePlus provides its partners with personnel that match the needs of each setting and guarantees 100% service coverage via a network of anesthesia service providers available in every state.
“Some centers may only have one or two anesthesia providers, but if you have a need for additional coverage – whether last minute or planned – having a top-notch staffing company gives you an advantage,” Caldwell explains. “Or, say the site wants to add another day of service or they want to add an additional room for one day. The right staffing support offers a ton of flexibility in those scenarios.”
By providing clinical expertise, business acumen, and an end-to-end solution, CarePlus helps centers realize operational improvement and service-line growth while ensuring regulatory compliance. Are you ready to optimize anesthesia management at your center? Click here to speak to a CarePlus leader today.