In an Oct. 14 white paper Surgical Directions and Ventra Health argue that hospitals should manage anesthesiology operations and revenue cycle management as one financial system to ease subsidy pressure and protect procedural access.
Surgical Directions recommends an adjusted OR utilization target of about 75%. The paper says many hospitals run between 50% and 65%. In one example with 23 ORs, about $2,300 a day in fixed anesthesia overhead for each staffed room added up to an estimated $4 million a year in unused anesthesia capacity.
“Every coverage decision has a financial consequence, and every revenue cycle result has an operational story behind it,” said Jason Klopotowski, MD, physician managing director of Surgical Directions, in a news release covering the paper.
Ventra pointed to results at client Centra Health after the 2024 Change Healthcare disruption. They included 35 average days in A/R, a denial rate below 5%, a 4.3% improvement in net collection rate and a $46,000 increase in average monthly collections. The authors note that these results apply to Centra and are not universal benchmarks.
“RCM performance is directly influenced by what happens upstream in operations,” said Jason Greenberg, MD, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of Ventra Health.
The paper lists five actions for leaders. Three of them are to:
- Build a single baseline of anesthetizing locations, staffing and revenue cycle metrics.
- Match OR, non-operating room anesthesia and after-hours coverage to actual demand before adding premium labor.
- Track operating metrics alongside cash and A/R aging in a shared executive dashboard.
Dr. Klopotowski said anesthesiology “has become an enterprise issue that touches access, workforce, margin and growth.”
Ventra Health provides revenue cycle services to facility-based physicians in anesthesia, emergency medicine, hospital medicine and radiology. Surgical Directions works with hospitals on surgical services, anesthesiology and sterile processing.
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