There are five key business challenges that are unique to anesthesiologists, but they could be solved by new, reliable data in the coming years, according to a new blog post from Tony Mira, founder and CEO of MiraMed Global and president and CEO of Anesthesia Business Consultants.
Five business challenges that data could help to solve for anesthesiologists:
1. Operating room utilization: Sometimes, hospitals use metrics that make operating rooms seem more productive than they actually are, according to the post. Anesthesia practices have the opportunity to measure actual, billable anesthesia time. Normalizing metrics is the best way for anesthesiologists to identify underutilized operating rooms.
2. Anesthesia provider productivity: While hospital administrators blame anesthesiologists for slowing down productivity, they are only as productive as the operating rooms they are assigned to. Anesthesiologists can calculate the amount of CRNAs and staffing costs in each location and recommend an optimal amount of staffing to increase productivity.
3. Economic trends: Anesthesia practices can monitor payer mix changes by surgeons over time. They can then provide a different perspective for how health systems should evaluate top surgeons.
4. Surgeon profitability: Based on billing data, anesthesiologists can track metrics including yield per bill unit, per case and per hour of anesthesia time. They can identify how surgeons create inefficient rooms by scheduling incorrectly.
5. Assessing true cost of coverage: Useful anesthesia analyses compare average hours of coverage required per anesthesia location to average actual billed hours. This can be used to identify minimum production requirements based on manpower.