Anesthesiology plays a critical role across all facets of perioperative and procedural services. With clinical expertise in pre-, intra-, and post-operative care, your anesthesia team has the potential to build strong networks with surgeons, nurses, and other peers in perioperative services and facility operations. These ties can enhance your existing surgical services to save time, reduce costs, and improve your facility’s brand among surgeons and patients.
Strong anesthesia leadership at the helm of collaborative anesthesia teams is an untapped resource for hospitals and health systems to improve care and drive growth. In assessing whether your existing anesthesia team is providing you with optimal services, you should consider the following outcomes as basic expectations, not value-adds.
Participating in pre-op assessments and optimization to reduce preventable case cancellations.
If your anesthesia team is addressing patient readiness for the first time on the day of surgery, it may already be too late. A proactive and experienced anesthesia team helps its hospital partner maximize performance and increase profitability by ensuring patients are ready for surgery well in advance of the scheduled date. Forward-thinking processes in pre-op assessment and optimization result in more dependable on-time starts, reduced length of stay, reduced readmissions, and increased quality and patient safety.
Leading a multidisciplinary approach to patient care from pre-op to post-operative, including pain management.
Creating a comprehensive patient care plan is a collaboration between anesthesiology and surgical services. Anesthesiology brings a unique skill set in areas of medicine such as risk stratification and pharmacology, which leads to safe and effective individualized patient care plans. By being both innovative and current in this area, the anesthesia team can support greater productivity, lower costs, maximize value, and streamline perioperative care. In addition, this approach can lead to improved satisfaction and reduced burnout for surgical and recovery unit colleagues.
Communicating frequently with surgeons and other OR staff, including case debriefs, to ensure results such as effective time-out processes.
While quality and patient safety should be table stakes, your anesthesia team and its leadership should be taking an active and collaborative role in facilitating communication and engagement. If current practice pathways such as ERAS are not already being utilized, the anesthesia team should lead the way to implement pathways that create more effective teamwork across surgical services, granting a voice to all members of the team. Outcomes from these informed and standardized care models extend beyond expectational patient care delivery concepts. They have been shown to provide economic benefits, improve staff retention, and reduce clinician burnout.
Training the anesthesia team with the latest patient care and quality innovations.
Medicine understands that knowledge is always evolving. Your anesthesia team should be training effective leaders to improve the work environment of the anesthesia team and constantly educating those team members on the current advancements in best practices, quality, and safety. Scaled anesthesia organizations take this further by leveraging the knowledge and expertise gained across hundreds of facilities to create a network of thousands of clinical experts who exchange insights on a regular basis, build new best practices, and even create nationally recognized protocols that lead to safer care.
Providing hospital leadership with regular OR utilization reports and allocation recommendations.
Engaged anesthesia teams become an integral part of their hospitals or health systems. They are eager to bring their perioperative expertise to the table on committees, working groups, and most importantly, directly to facility leadership. Scale also enables the power of data, which facilitates informed clinical and business decisions. If a facility is struggling with staffing, how do leaders make decisions about service lines or scheduling? If a facility is trying to manage lagging turnover times or high cancellation statistics, how do leaders handle those difficult conversations with surgeons? If a system is seeking to streamline services, how do leaders understand utilization metrics? The answer to these questions—and more—is data. Infrastructure across a national footprint captures valuable data from millions of cases annually, which can be used by the anesthesia and facility leadership to analyze and apply in various ways. In collaboration with the anesthesia team, administration can make clear and confident decisions that deliver results about quality, operations, staffing, or even materials management to improve care and place the organization on stronger financial footing.
How does North American Partners in Anesthesia (NAPA) measure up in these areas? Let’s connect and discuss how the NAPA Difference sets our organization apart from other anesthesia services.