Member Focus

Title: Director of Clinical Operations
Facility Name: Surgical Management Professionals
City: Sioux Falls
State: South Dakota
Length of time your facility has been an ASCA member: Five or more years

What changes in the OAS CAHPS Survey would make the experience easier and more productive?

The length of the survey is a huge dissatisfier for patients, who face survey fatigue as a result of survey requests from provider offices, imaging, anesthesia providers, PT providers, etc. Our patients are seen by multiple entities before they reach our ASC, each with their own survey, and in many instances, the patients do not differentiate between the provider office and the ASC. This leads to them thinking they have already completed the survey, and other times, it results in feedback regarding the experiences with the provider office rather than the ASC.

Repeat patients simply do not even start the survey after having experienced it once, and many voice their frustration with the survey during subsequent visits or postop phone calls. Other patients do not complete the survey, resulting in responses to questions that appear later in the survey not being representative of the patient population.

These issues reduce response rate, data accuracy and patient satisfaction with the feedback process.

What strategies are you using to manage the anesthesia shortage?

We have seen multiple strategies implemented to manage the anesthesia shortage at our centers. Sites that have historically worked with an MDA-only model have moved to hybrid or CRNA-only models. There is a stronger focus on optimizing OR utilization, which sometimes results in closing ORs, adjusting hours and eliminating flip rooms to ensure anesthesia coverage.

A collaborative partnership with our anesthesia groups is essential to the success of our ASCs. Anesthesia providers are business partners, and like all business relationships, it needs to be mutually beneficial. Understanding how our anesthesia providers are paid and the gaps between overhead and reimbursement allows conversations to ensure the anesthesia providers' financial success. In some markets, our ASCs are subsidizing their anesthesia providers, which keeps them afloat in their daily operations but also allows them to have bargaining power when recruiting new providers.