Quality improvement is an integral part of anesthesia practice success, according to Spiro G. Spanakis, DO, of Worcester, Mass.-based UMass Memorial Medical Center.
Anesthesia Business Consultants President and CEO Tony Mira shared takeaways from Dr. Spanakis' presentation at the American Society of Anesthesiologists' Practice Management 2019, Jan. 18-20 in Las Vegas.
Four quality improvement strategies:
1. Define goals. Identify which areas need the most attention, such as practice-specific problems, service-level agreements or ongoing professional practice evaluations.
2. Identify existing data. Gathering new data is difficult, so turn to quality data registries as a resource.
3. Review billing data. Determine which procedures are performed the most frequently. Basing quality measures on these cases can have a significant impact.
4. Follow best practices. Consult PubMed to see what other anesthesia groups have done, follow the American Society of Anesthesiologists' five-step process for quality measure development and review the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation's 2018 list of perioperative patient safety priorities.