Three Ways a Strong Anesthesia Partner Serves Hospitals and ASCs
Three Ways a Strong Anesthesia Partner Serves Hospitals and ASCs
By Bryan Cali, Vice President
Business Development Midwest Region, NAPA
Hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) rely on their anesthesia partners to keep their operating rooms (ORs) humming, so many organizations believe that if they choose a provider to address basic staffing needs, their problems are solved. But a great anesthesia partner adds value far beyond covering ORs. On top of staffing, you need strong, local leadership coupled with an infrastructure that can drive the clinical enterprise to function at its fullest potential and truly add value.
To do all this and stay ahead of the challenges confronting healthcare providers, scale matters. Local anesthesia groups often struggle because they lack the resources that matter to hospital and ASC administrators.
This is generally the case nationwide, and specifically true in the Midwest, where reimbursements for anesthesia and other specialties are typically lower than in other parts of the country. Especially in this fee-sensitive environment, hospital and ASC executives should seek proof that they are getting a strong return on their investment and great service from their anesthesia partner.
Proof should be quantitative and qualitative. Either way, seek excellence in these three areas:
1. RELIABLE STAFFING
Staffing is “job one” for any anesthesia partner. In an industry already fraught with scarcity and related compensation challenges, healthcare administrators must be fiscally and culturally aligned with an anesthesia partner that can recruit and retain talented clinicians without sacrificing precious OR time. When facilities and anesthesia groups have a model that aligns incentives around a common goal to deliver safe, high-quality patient care in a financially responsible manner, then both sides’ objectives can be met.
National and regional scale provides the flexibility to move anesthesia providers among sites in given markets to meet dynamic needs. It is important to have locally dedicated recruiting capabilities, and relationships with clinical training programs within each geographic area, so that your anesthesia provider can adapt and grow with you. Having a partner that can provide the appropriate staffing in a dynamic environment is essential to optimizing your efficiency and profitability.
2. ACCOUNTABILITY THROUGH INFRASTRUCTURE
In this value-based healthcare era, hospitals crave data as a tool to measure performance and maximize economics. An accountable anesthesia provider is supported by an infrastructure that can enable the clinical enterprise to drive value. To do so, they must be oriented around service and growth, and possess the tools necessary to prove the provider’s value both in the OR and the executive suite.
An effective anesthesia infrastructure starts with:
• a strong quality-improvement program
• meaningful analytics
• recruitment designed to meet growth needs
• leadership and succession planning
• innovation and thought leadership
Anesthesia is a function that is critical to the OR, and therefore not something that should be viewed simply as a staffing problem and deployed in a low-cost environment. You want a partner that:
• applies data-driven decision-making and shares data that demonstrates value
• seeks stakeholder feedback on performance (e.g., patient and surgeon satisfaction surveys)
• brings a meaningful voice around ways to improve performance across the perioperative environment
• collaborates with you to apply the evidence-based learnings to enhance OR efficiency and achieve exceptional patient experiences
3. ACCESSIBLE LEADERSHIP
COVID underscored how critically hospitals and ASCs need an anesthesia partner that values strong leadership and accountability as key tenets of a productive partnership. Effective advancement of the perioperative environment requires collaboration and thought leadership on the part of any anesthesia partner. If your anesthesia partner isn’t bringing you ideas and actionable data on a regular basis, then your expectations are too low. A regional team of local clinical and business leaders who are specific to a market and who have a coast-to-coast network of anesthesia experts at their disposal gives the local team access to knowledge capital that is critical to success.
Cultivating future leaders is equally important to administrators who know that it takes an effective chief to drive a successful anesthesia program. You want to look for an organization with a proven leadership development program that is continuously preparing anesthesia clinicians to move up to rewarding positions and helm new sites, supporting growth for both clinicians and partners.
An effective partner must have the necessary scale to provide staffing, leadership, and infrastructure, and the capacity to grow with you into the next decade of unprecedented change. NAPA is the largest single-specialty, clinician-led anesthesia group with more than 30 years of industry experience. Let’s discuss your goals and how we can use our experience, scale, and strength to drive your financial and operational performance.
Bryan Cali serves as Vice President of Business Development in NAPA’s Midwest Region, where he is focused on developing partnerships with hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, and anesthesia physician practices that create value around operating room performance, patient experience, and profitability.
Bryan’s career experience includes advising healthcare organizations on matters related to strategy, finance, and operations. He has developed specific expertise in illustrating the financial and operational impacts of strategic decisions made by healthcare organizations. Bryan has extensive experience working with senior executives who are committed to transforming their organizational model in ways that align with patient-community needs. Bryan has also served in various corporate development roles, including with a private-equity-sponsored healthcare investment firm focused on investing in, developing, and managing surgical facilities.
Bryan holds an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BBA in Accounting from the University of Iowa.