The Importance of Quality in Anesthesia

By Lance Mueller
Director of Healthcare Quality

In June, Ventra’s Chief Client Officer, Dr. Jason Greenberg, shared 3 Ways to Optimize Your Independent Anesthesia Practice for Success in a Changing Market.

The three ways are:

1. Review and Renegotiate Your Contracts.
2. Manage your workforce smartly.
3. Right-size your administrative team.

We will examine how Quality & MIPS reporting interact with these three concepts for practice sustainability and professional satisfaction.

High-quality anesthesia care has a ripple effect on the broader healthcare system. Quality anesthesia care contributes to healthcare delivery’s overall efficiency and effectiveness.

Review and Renegotiate Your Contracts

Many commercial payers have Pay-For-Quality programs that incentivize clinicians to share group/individual performance on quality measures.

UnitedHealthcare (UHC) has its Physician Performance-Based Compensation program, which “is committed to providing physicians with actionable, patient-specific information that will help them deliver the best possible clinical care while empowering them to meet personal and professional goals through our Physician Performance-Based Compensation Program (PPBC).” The PPBC incentivizes medical groups. Also, within the PPBC umbrella, UHC has the Quality-Based Physician Incentive Program (QPIP) specific to physicians.

The other larger commercial payers have similar programs. Ask your commercial payers about their particular programs in your state.

TIP: Use nationally recognized, standardized quality measures, such as the clinical quality and QCDR measures available from CMS in the MIPS Pathway of the QPP. Some clients collect performance indicators critical to the hospital for an incentive on their stipend agreement.

Manage your Workforce Smartly

Understanding the quality of care your anesthesia group provides patients, their families, and your facilities is essential as clinicians come and go within your group—especially Locum providers.

Poor quality outcomes on low-speed outcomes such as PONV and PAIN are often early indicators of more significant workforce stresses. Early interventions can resolve workforce issues before they become significant issues.

Tracking performance promotes accountability across the group. A robust quality program speaks to your group’s core values and can help recruit new team members.

Right-Size Your Administrative Team

Recording, reporting, and reviewing quality outcomes can significantly burden administrative staff.

You want clinical quality measures that are meaningful to clinicians and don’t add a significant burden to administrative staff to compile, report, and review. The process with your quality vendor/RCM company should be streamlined, with little to no manual intervention.

Performance Feedback reports should quickly identify areas needing attention. Many vendors flood you with data, providing monthly reports that run hundreds of pages but do not say anything. Make sure your performance feedback provides actionable insight.

TIP: Collect quality measures relying on existing data that contributes to actionable feedback.

Conclusion

Providing high-quality care is quickly becoming a differentiator with facilities and payers. Groups that recognize this are positioning themselves for future success.

Groups are competing for contracts, clinicians, and administrative staff. A robust quality program contributes to these areas by reducing the burden on clinicians/staff and demonstrating a group’s values.

How Ventra Health Can Help

Ventra Health clients benefit from our expertise and support in the areas covered within this blog post and for every aspect of revenue cycle management.

Ventra’s Payer Strategy and Contracting team leverages our vast database of rates and terms to build data-driven support for reimbursement strategy and contract negotiations.

Leverage our Performance Surveillance Team and vSight™️, Ventra’s powerful data and analytics platform, for revenue opportunities, benchmarking data, denials management, and more.

The goal of our Provider Education team is to improve coding accuracy, reduce audit challenges, and ultimately help increase revenue by streamlining the revenue cycle. From updating clients on new Medicare guidelines, to rooting out coding and documentation errors that lead to denials and underpayments, our education services contribute directly to our clients’ reimbursement.

You’ll have access to all these resources through our white-glove experience, which provides a dedicated Client Success team to partner with you, engaging frequently to discuss challenges and understand clients’ objectives.

Learn More

The Ventra Health team has decades of experience partnering with anesthesia practices to solve complex business challenges. Meet an expert to learn how we can help with payer contracting, facility subsidy support, administrative optimization, and more.