As an independent anesthesiology group competing with national chains, it’s critical that you’re collecting the maximum revenue you’re entitled to. The main benefit of working with Fusion Anesthesia is that we can help you increase your take-home by an additional 5-15%.

But another benefit is that we can help optimize your scheduling. This will ensure that each physician is putting in the maximum billable hours with as little downtime as possible.

Each anesthesiologist in your practice should be putting in the maximum billable hours with as little downtime as possible.

We are pros at optimizing anesthesiologist schedules. We offer a data-rich, analytic toolset that is available for free to any customer who uses our billing services. This toolset allows you to see a dashboard overview of your business or drill down to the finest details. It offers several key metrics that help you easily drive improvements in the efficiency of your practice’s scheduling. These metrics include:

• The Block Time Utilization Tool
• The Room Utilization Graph
• The Provider Concurrency Grid

Altogether, these three metrics are the keys to scheduling the most efficient anesthesiology practice on the planet. In fact, with our insight and guidance, your practice can be fully optimized within three to six months.

Fusion Anesthesia can fully optimize your practice’s scheduling within three to six months.

The Block Time Utilization Graph

The Block Time Utilization Graph shows which surgeons are using (or not using) which operating rooms, and how this impacts your practice.

To uncover this information, we upload your hospital’s surgeons’ schedules into our toolset and compare that with anesthesiologist time worked. With this data in place, we know exactly when a particular surgeon is reserving ORs that he or she isn’t using.

The Block Time Utilization Graph shows you which surgeons aren’t using the ORs they reserve.

When surgeons cherry-pick the best ORs at the best times and then end up not assigning cases to them, anesthesiologists are left twiddling their thumbs. Because most anesthesiologists are only paid when they’re working, this means your practice is losing opportunities to make money.

Using the Block Time Utilization Graph, we can compare block times for any surgeon and any anesthesiologist assigned to that surgeon. This way, you can know which surgeons are giving you billable hours and which are giving you the short end of the stick.

With the Block Time Utilization Graph, you can learn which surgeons are giving you the most billable hours.

Believe it or not, there’s a good chance your hospital doesn’t have this data. During contract negotiations, most hospital administrators are surprised to learn that their ORs are being reserved but not used. Having this data at the negotiating table puts you in a great position to work out a favorable contact while at the same time helping the hospital improve its own scheduling efficiency.

The Room Utilization Graph

The Room Utilization Graph shows how many anesthesiologists and CRNAs are assigned to ORs at a particular hour of the day. We have the ability to examine each case down to the minute and determine exactly how much anesthesia time went into the case.

Taking that data, coupled with how many providers were active in cases at a certain time, we can normalize how many unique providers were active during each minute of anesthesia time, and how many cases were running with those unique providers.

Using this information, an anesthesia practice can easily fine-tune its staffing based on historical and moving averages. You’ll be able to uncover which types of cases and which surgeons offer the most anesthesia time, as well as which hours of the day and which surgeons had the least activity.

With the Room Utilization Graph, you can optimize how many anesthesiologists and CRNAs are assigned to each OR during a particular time of day.

To capture this data, you don’t even need any information from your hospital. Only Fusion Anesthesia has access to room utilization data, once again giving you a serious advantage when it comes time to optimizing your resource utilization or negotiating your next hospital contract.

The Provider Concurrency Grid

The Provider Concurrency Grid is a simple, color-coded graph that shows you how many concurrent cases each anesthesiologist in your practice has taken on over the course of a day. It can also show you whether they supervised those cases or performed the services directly.

Because the grid is color-coded, you can easily tell which providers are involved in the most cases concurrently. Dark green means you’re at the maximum number of cases (right where you want to be), light green means three cases, and yellow means two cases. Grey means only a single case and black means zero cases.

You can track this information per provider per hour, so you can easily find holes in a provider’s schedule and figure out a better time to reassign them so they’re covering more cases.

For anesthesiologists on-call for OB, ER, or cardiovascular cases, the Provider Concurrency Grid can show you exactly how much time each anesthesiologist sat idle. When negotiating your next contract, you’ll be able to show this to your hospital and say, “My providers are less than 75% utilized. Here’s the data in black and white.” At that point, you’ll be in a much better position to negotiate subsidies.

Fusion Anesthesia: Your Partner in Schedule Optimization

We have over 40 years’ experience of serving only anesthesiologists. When we take on a new client, we immediately begin collecting essential data about their practices and their facilities so we can make insightful suggestions on how to optimize their staffing models. We can fully optimize your practice’s scheduling within three to six months.

Interested in learning more about how Fusion Anesthesia can increase your take home pay and simultaneously tune up your staffing model? Contact us today.