White paper argues that surgical facilities should manage costs of anesthesia operations and billing/collections as ‘one financial system’

A new white paper takes a deep dive into a challenge facing the entire perioperative services industry: managing the skyrocketing costs of anesthesia services while ensuring operations stay on track.

The white paper, “Anesthesiology at the Intersection of Operations and Revenue Cycle,” is available to read for free here. Produced by healthcare solutions company Surgical Directions and physician-focused revenue cycle management solutions provider Ventra Health, but avoiding any hint of a sales pitch, it examines “how connecting operations and revenue cycle management can reduce subsidy pressure, protect procedural access and improve financial performance.”

The paper asserts that financial performance for anesthesiology is too frequently managed as “two separate problems: the cost and operational side of coverage and the revenue side of billing and collections. It argues that the two problems are in fact “fundamentally connected” and urges surgical facilities to “improve anesthesiology performance by managing them as one financial system.” In the process, it explores how “staffing models, utilization, scheduling, provider enrollment, documentation, payor performance, and collections interact to shape the financial performance of anesthesia services.”

The paper outlines five actions that surgical and perioperative executives should take “to move from siloed management toward integrated performance”:

• Create one baseline that establishes “a common view of anesthetizing locations, coverage hours, provider types, staffing models, case volume, locum use, payor status and core revenue cycle metrics.”
• Align coverage to demand by using procedural volume and growth expectations to align OR, non-OR anesthesia (NORA) and after-hours coverage “with actual demand before adding permanent or premium labor.”
• Protect revenue at the source by integrating “documentation expectations, chart completion, provider education and enrollment into workforce and operational workflows.”
• Pair operating and revenue cycle metrics to “connect utilization, workforce cost and productivity with cash, payor performance and [accounts receivable] aging in a shared executive dashboard.”
• Make governance accountable by bringing “administration, anesthesiology, perioperative leadership, finance and revenue cycle together with defined ownership, decision rights and accountability.”

The “broader message” of the white paper, the companies state, is that “economics in anesthesiology cannot be fully understood through subsidy, staffing or revenue cycle performance alone. Operations create the conditions for revenue, while revenue cycle management converts delivered care into realized revenue. Managing the two together can give leaders a clearer view of where value is being lost and where corrective action can have an enterprise-level impact.”

Read the full white paper here.