The word “alignment” was used frequently among leaders at Becker’s 31st Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, which took place Oct. 16-18 in Chicago.
Alignment among anesthesia groups, ASCs, and other team members and leadership was a chief concern as many ASCs outsource their anesthesia coverage to groups of physicians and certified registered nurse anesthetists. This means that finding alignment on expectations and processes can present an extra challenge.
“Being a large private practice, we cover on any given day, 20 to 25 brick-and-mortar places. Some have one room, some have 40 rooms, right?” Jack Dillon, CEO of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Anesthesia Practice Consultants, said in the Oct. 16 panel. “The hard part about it is not everybody goes everywhere, nor does everybody want to go everywhere, right? So you’re trying to align what the needs are by locations with what your people want to do. And that can be really, really hard sometimes.”
On the anesthesia side, this means that scheduling between providers and ASCs must be a clearly communicated and collaborative process.
“[It’s] really understanding what people want to do and where people want to work and designing your teams around that,” Mr. Dillon said. “And collaborating with those partner sites to say, ‘I know this place is great, and you guys have a wonderful center here, but we’re struggling to find people who want to work these schedules.’ How can we partner? How can we align and best use our teams most efficiently?”
He added that in the highly strained anesthesia labor market of 2025, he and his organization have found many ASC leaders willing to be flexible, especially if it means avoiding paying a stipend for anesthesia.
“They’re willing to move those needles if it means that we have the same financial arrangement,” Mr. Dillon said.
Data analytics are also a foundational aspect of alignment between anesthesia professionals and ASCs, Brett Maxfield, CRNA, president and CEO of Rigby, Idaho-based Maxfield Healthcare Solutions, said during his time on the panel.
“Steamlining has made the biggest difference for us,” he said. “It’s understood with the staff that 15 minutes is your turnover time, and if you start getting outside of that parameter, we do evaluations to try to figure out what’s going on, why it is that people aren’t meeting the goals we’ve set.”
Leveraging data related to turnover times and operation room efficiency can also be a benefit to surgeons, which, in turn, brings them further into alignment with anesthesia teams and support staff.
“Everybody knows that, with your surgeons, you’ve got their stated time and their true, actual operating time,” Mr. Maxfield said. “And so we’ve gotten started pulling raw data and just saying, ‘Hey, I know what you claim, but this is what you actually have. So this is what you’re going to be allowed to schedule.’ By doing that, we’ve been able to kind of streamline those multiple days.”
