The daily tasks and routines of running an anesthesia practice are now becoming a full-time job on its own outside of the operating room, according to physicians.
From shifting cases between different operating rooms and sites, cross-training staff to fix problems when they arise and ensuring that every procedure on the schedule is adequately staffed, anesthesiologists have been pulled out of the OR.
These four leaders shared their insights at Becker’s 31st Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: When you think about your current day-to-day reality in your work, what’s the most important dynamic shaping your perspective or your approach?
Maggie Jeffries, MD. President of the Ophthalmic Anesthesia Society (Houston): Running my anesthesia practice has become a full-time job, and I’ve never spent more time out of the operating room than I do now. My No. 1 challenge, really, is dollars. How do I pay my anesthesia team members? The rates that inflation demands, with the always declining reimbursements, and figuring that out. I have to look at a day-to-day basis and talk to my ORs and shift cases around to a level that I’ve never seen. So it’s a full-time job for me just to manage where every single person is so that we know that at the end of the month, payroll is going to get paid.
Adamina Podraza, MD. Anesthesiologist of Anesthesia Consultants of Morris and Medical Director of Deerpath Ambulatory Surgical Center (Morris, Ill.): Optimizing pre-op design, especially in a small rural area, for me, is important. Cross-training of staff to make sure that we have appropriate staff there and if something does change, using computerized tools to guide our nurses that are talking to the pre-op patients to place them optimally. You make plans to be scheduled at a surgery center to find out that they’re not an optimal candidate for that center.
Leopoldo Rodriguez, MD. Associate Professor, Anesthesiology of MUSC Health (Charleston, S.C.): The most important thing is to work as a team. In healthcare, we are in a service business. We serve the community, and having good integration between administrators, nurses, surgeons and anesthesiologists to make decisions as a team is the most important thing that we can do in our business.
Jay Weller, MD. Anesthesiologist of Seven Hills Anesthesia and System Chief, Perioperative Medicine and Anesthesiology of TriHealth (Cincinnati): In my day-to-day reality, it’s really figuring out how are we going to log all the holes. There’s been a lot of talk about the staffing crisis here. Amazingly, we still have to convince people, sometimes locally, that there is an anesthesia staffing crisis. We spend a lot of time figuring out who is appropriate for what location, what case, what patient. We do everything in the ambulatory setting, from topical cataract surgery to same day total joints to spine surgery. It’s really become a more than full-time job for physicians to look at schedules that are constantly changing and making sure we get the right people in the right places.
