The following information was provided by Jay Horowitz, candidate for AANA Region 7 director. With the current budget restraints and emphasis on efficiency, Jay has documented the inherent inefficiency of staffing ratios and the cost to the system. Read Jay’s comments, link to the supporting articles and return to procrna.com and offer your comments.
From Jay: This week an article appears in “Anesthesiology, The Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Inc.” (!!): Supervision Ratios that gets to the heart of the inefficiencies, waste and fraud inherent in “supervision” and “medical direction” models of anesthesia delivery. With an average 22 minute delay in multiple operating rooms several times a day, and an average Medicare reimbursement rate of $1.43/minute X 250 working days a year X 1000’s of US operating rooms, the money adds up awfully fast! So do the savings with greater CRNA utilization models validated in the recent Health Affairs and Nursing Economics articles with NO compromise in quality of care. Click here to read the ASA article.
I’ve been writing about these inefficiencies for some time now: Streamlining Anesthesia Care and how we might rationally fix the problem. We need to make sure that this kind of information is available to every state and national decision maker and other stakeholders. Click here to read an article from the Herald Tribune.
Read, enjoy, and return to make a comment
Jay, thanks for sharing this information. It only documents what we all know is true. If supervising CRNAs is inefficient, I suspect that supervising AAs is even less efficient. Are there studies comparing AA supervision to CRNA supervision?