Access to your data is your key to success.
Whether you are an administrator for a facility or an anesthesia group, data is king, and you’ll financially suffer in today’s regulatory environment without timely and easy access to it.
I just returned from the Texas Society of Anesthesiologist’s first annual Practice Management seminar and enjoyed listening to Dr. Keith Chamberlain’s lecture titled “Why Do Hospitals Look to Change Anesthesia Services”. Much of his lecture highlighted the importance of your group knowing its data — efficiency, throughput, patient safety metrics. Even if the data isn’t the best, self-reporting with an improvement plan shows the hospital administration your goals are aligned with theirs and your taking a proactive position to improve the services provided. Administration will feel more comfortable with your group’s leadership.
Without the actual data, you’ll likely sound no better than a well-polished marketing routine.
Growing and Maintaining Market Share
Compare the following two pitches for new contracts:
“At Selfless Anesthesia, LLC, we value quality anesthesia. Our commitment to our patients, surgeons and hospitals can be seen through the education, training and experience of each of our doctors. Under our physicians, patients can be assured that they are in the very best of hands, for any type of surgery.”
vs.
“At Giving Anesthesia, LLC, we value high-quality, efficient anesthesia. From our group’s average anesthesia ready time of 6.2 minutes, on-time start rate of >96.4% over the past 4 quarters, and patient satisfaction scores >99%, we understand value. We also understand patient safety, as our providers consistently meet or exceed physician quality reporting metrics >97.3% of the time. With our live, business intelligence platform, we know your facility’s average, hourly location utilization, individual surgeon and specialty productivity, and more importantly, will identify issues before they escalate.”
Who will the hospital will have more confidence in?
Anesthesia’s Grand Challenge: Data
Many groups service a variety of institutions, facilities, and offices with different EMR solutions or none at all. As an industry, we are “waiting” for our hospitals to make the large purchases. Even if some of us our taking influential roles in those decisions, we are still waiting for “the other guy to write the check”. As a result, we both lose influence in the design of the software we must then use, but more importantly, we lose access to our data. It’s arguably our most precious resource. We lose significant negotiating leverage because our data is either owned and viewed by the hospital first or it’s spread across 4-5 different EMR platforms, with the remaining on paper. It’s an expensive mess in an increasingly regulated environment.
With AnesthesiaEMR, we’ve developed a fast, easy, mobile, and data-centric approach for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. There’s no large capital expense required, especially if the facility pays for the Tablets PCs. With our software-as-a-service model, you pay for what you use, and as a consequence, you both own your group’s data and you will use a system that works beautifully for today’s mobile anesthesiologist.
Dramatically increase your value added proposition with the right business intelligence platform. Consider testing AnesthesiaEMR in your practice today.
