In an environment where hospitals increasingly subsidize anesthesia services, groups are expected to demonstrate efficiency, cost awareness and stronger partnership with facility leadership.
A November 3 blog post by Coronis Health, examined why today’s anesthesia practices must broaden their focus beyond delivering high-quality clinical care and how tracking provider productivity and operating room utilization has become essential to meeting fair market value expectations, maintaining financial stability and navigating ongoing workforce shortages.
Here are three takeaways:
1. Keys to future growth
The quality of anesthesia care is stronger than ever, but it is no longer enough to secure or retain hospital contracts. Practices are expected to excel in customer service, expense control and collaborative engagement with administration.
Because most hospitals now subsidize anesthesia services, ensuring every arrangement reflects fair market value has become a central priority, increasing the need for measurable performance and operational transparency.
In order to achieve their goals, practices must demonstrate:
- Strong customer service
- Expense control
- Collaborative engagement with administration
2. Tracking success
Labor, including anesthesiologists, CRNAs and AAs, represents the greatest share of anesthesia costs. As a result, monitoring productivity and operating room utilization is crucial.
Two methods exist:
- Raw counts (cases, units, hours per provider)
- Normalized metrics (average productivity per clinical day)
Normalized data is preferred because it supports accurate benchmarking, highlights underutilized rooms and offers clearer comparisons across providers and locations.
Evaluating productivity by anesthetizing location helps practices identify which rooms consistently operate efficiently and which operate at a loss. To make this possible, groups must clearly define all anesthetizing locations, ensure they are recorded accurately on every anesthesia record and often use a scorecard to reinforce documentation consistency.
Non-OR cases, fluctuating room assignments and specialty rooms such as cardiac and pediatrics add complexity, especially since compensation inflators for those specialties drive up staffing costs.
3. Data wins
Reliable productivity and utilization metrics give anesthesia groups a strong foundation for discussions with hospital leadership about coverage needs, room efficiency, staffing levels and financial support.
As anesthesia provider shortages continue, both practices and administrators must rely on data-driven management tools to optimize OR use and control costs.
