Strong anesthesia partnerships are vital to ASC performance, particularly as securing coverage becomes more and more difficult.
Jeff Tieder, MSN, CRNA, clinical assistant professor in the nurse anesthesia concentration at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, joined Becker’s to outline the key metrics ASCs should monitor.
Editor’s note: This response has been edited lightly for clarity and length.
Question: What metrics or indicators should ASCs track to evaluate the strength of their anesthesia partnership?
Jeff Tieder: From my standpoint, I’d focus on reducing opioid usage, PACU time and improving block utilization. One of the first things to look at is surgeon identification or patient ID time.
You know, it’s always the running joke — the history of every operating room: it’s always anesthesia’s fault. And that’s fine. Everybody talks about turnover time. I’ve been doing this for over two decades, and in every administrative meeting I’ve ever attended, the first topic is turnover time. That’s not going to change. It’s always a concern, and it’s never fast enough.
So instead of fixating on turnover time, let’s focus on what we can control. If a case is scheduled to start at 7:30, what time did the surgeon ID the patient? Was it 7:35? That makes it hard for anyone else to meet the on-time metric.
What’s our block utilization? How often are we performing pre-op peripheral nerve blocks, especially in ASCs? What’s our use of long-acting local anesthetics? And how does all of that affect PACU time?
In smaller ASCs with just one or two ORs, you can get backlogged quickly. If a surgeon moves through cases fast, and you’re stuck recovering a patient in the OR because PACU is backed up — maybe someone’s there vomiting from opioid-related nausea — that delays the whole day.
Using blocks can help manage and prevent that, getting patients in and out more efficiently.
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