Anesthesia is a rapidly developing field, with developments in AI and clinical care shifting the way that anesthesia professionals approach perioperative care.
Four anesthesia leaders recently joined Becker’s to share the most exciting developments happening in the specialty.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length:
Megan Friedman, DO. Anesthesiologist and Director of Pacific Coast Anesthesia Consultants (Los Angeles): I’m most excited about how AI-driven scheduling and real-time analytics are transforming anesthesia operations. We’ve adopted a platform that builds our schedule based on provider availability, skill set, and site-specific volume forecasts. It also tracks clock-ins via geolocation and pushes real-time overtime data to me each day.
That level of visibility has allowed us to proactively adjust staffing, reduce unnecessary coverage, and optimize room utilization. At one of our hospitals, we increased prime-time OR utilization to over 80% — all while improving schedule predictability and flexibility for our anesthesiologists.
That flexibility has directly improved anesthesiologist satisfaction, which has strengthened our ability to recruit and retain talent. In a national climate where rooms are closing due to staffing shortages, we’ve remained fully staffed across multiple hospitals.
It’s a perfect example of how the right technology can simultaneously improve efficiency, provider satisfaction and financial sustainability.
Gregory Rendelman, CRNA. Department of Veterans Affairs (Lancaster, Pa.): The most innovative platform that anesthesia should adopt is any entity that decides to establish an [ASC] or any other facility outside of a hospital, should be equipped with the ability to, at the mere click of a button, employ the power of artificial intelligence to determine the most cost-effective anesthesia model that yields the safest outcomes. This decision should not be influenced by lobbying or financial bias on behalf of the owners, partners or private equity of the aforementioned centers. Instead, it should be based solely on rigorous evidence and outcomes from anesthesia safety data.
Nathan Schatzman, MD. Chief of Anesthesia at Hamilton Medical Center (Dalton, Ga.): We have refined the process of early/rapid extubation of our post-[coronary artery bypass grafting] procedures by performing thoracic single shot erector spinae blocks combined with limited narcotic administration (limited to 4 ml of fentanyl and no long-acting narcotics). We have successfully extubated over 250 consecutive post open CABG procedures, with zero reintubations needed/performed. No specific patient selection was required, and all patients have benefited from the technique. Early neurologic and physiological assessments are performed within 30 minutes. This technique avoids the hyperadrenergic response often exhibited with extubation in the intensive care unit. The surgeons have been completely satisfied and enthusiastically embrace the use of this technique.
Jeff Tieder, MSN, CRNA. Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga: One of the innovations in anesthesia I’m most excited about is the continued advancement and integration of peripheral regional anesthesia techniques. With the increased availability and precision of ultrasound guidance, these blocks have become safer, more effective, and more widely applicable across surgical disciplines.
Peripheral nerve blocks offer significant benefits: reduced opioid use, faster recovery, fewer systemic side effects, and improved postoperative pain control. As the field pushes toward opioid sparing and outpatient-centered models, regional techniques are becoming the cornerstone of modern anesthesia practice.
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