Anesthesia Practice Management Blogs

Quality in anesthesia has traditionally involved assessing patient complication rates based on available outcome data. This approach does provide useful information, but it’s often difficult to determine the impact of each individual since medicine is a team activity. As a result, the definition of quality has evolved to focus on metrics that increase the opportunities…

A strong, well-functioning anesthesia program can make or break the efficiency of your ORs. When your anesthesia department is efficient, ORs run on time and quality metrics are more easily achievable, contributing to your hospital’s overall operational and financial success. Evidence-based principles within the anesthesia program will promote patient satisfaction, throughput and safety. Here, we…

Since anesthesia providers play such an important role in patient care and surgery, their cultural competency skills must be strong. In the context of the healthcare provider-patient/provider-family relationship, cultural competency refers to the ability to bridge cultural differences between the provider and the patient or their family to provide respectful, compassionate and effective care. Differences…

As long as drug hazards exist for patients everywhere, improving medication management should be an ongoing priority for any anesthesia department. The Institute of Medicine has estimated that each year medication errors injure at least 1.5 million Americans and cost the health care system more than $3.5 billion. Not only do anesthesia providers have to…

Predicting surgical case durations is an important element of reversing operating room inefficiencies. Routinely overestimating or underestimating the amount of time a case may take can wreak havoc on the entire perioperative care continuum and result in costly budget overages or missed revenue opportunities. When our clients are motivated to better predict surgical case duration…

Rural hospitals face many challenges in meeting the surgical needs of the communities they serve. Our goal at CCI Anesthesia is to alleviate those challenges related to anesthesia services. Over the course of our experience serving community hospitals, we have developed an in-depth understanding and appreciation of the importance of anesthesia care in rural communities.…

At CCI Anesthesia, we are huge proponents of medical team training programs. When surgical teams are in sync and running at peak performance levels, benefits abound. Our anesthesia providers know that their roles extend beyond the delivery of anesthesia care—it is their duty to serve as part of a high-functioning team working toward a common…

Hospital or surgical facility administrators seeking to learn more about anesthesia billing and staffing models are smart to educate themselves on the ins and outs of supervision vs. medical direction related to anesthesia care. Although CRNA supervision vs. medical direction seems simple in concept, there are many important details to consider when determining the suitable…