Thomas Durick, MD, anesthesiologist at Columbus-based Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, joined Becker's to discuss how he believes the anesthesia provider shortage will accelerate consolidation.
Question: How will the anesthesia provider shortage disrupt care in the next five years?
Editor's note: This response was edited lightly for clarity and length.
Dr. Thomas Durick: As private equity firms keep buying up practices and making promises to hospital administrators they cannot keep (such as "We can reduce your costs by not having to pay a sustenance fee to an anesthesia group," "We can staff all your operating suites fully," or "We can recruit and retain better"), the art of private practice will go the way of the dinosaur. We will all become employees of whichever firm/company/entity offers us the best package that meets our basic needs.
For some, it is time off. For others, it is all about the money. Yet others need better benefits. After 30 years in private practice, most of those spent truly solo as an independent contractor, it is more challenging than ever to stay competitive in the market for anesthesiologists. After COVID-19, people found they didn't care to work 80-plus hours per week anymore; that they liked being home with their family; that there was more to life than work, call, submit charges and do it again tomorrow. We will see a continued reduction in the viable anesthesia workforce that will never correct itself. There will be far more job openings than those filling those jobs, and that continued pressure from the C-suite to expand vertically (meaning we work longer hours each day for the same pay) and horizontally (keep opening operating rooms even if we don't have the staff or patients to fill then just in case a surgeon wants to operate) to make up for declining reimbursements from all payers and inefficient billing, coding and collection practices will continue to whittle away at the anesthesia workforce.
There is a breaking point for each person; once their individual breaking point is reached, each person has to make that choice to do what is in the individual's best interest or keep plugging harder to make ends meet. Our biggest problem (and our known weakness to administrators) is our extreme dedication to what we do: We work until the cases are done, no matter what.