We have noticed that too many anesthesia billing consultants and companies focus on the trees instead of the forest when it comes to anesthesia billing. Their focus is often entirely on the mechanics of the anesthesia billing process. While the nuts and bolts of anesthesia billing are extremely important– they can only have so much impact when it comes to increasing revenue.

Anesthesia billing is just one component of running a successful independent practice or larger anesthesia department.

In order to make larger and more impactful improvements, your anesthesia billing consultant must take into account the entire “forest” that is your independent practice or larger anesthesia department.

A Comprehensive Approach

Fusion Anesthesia takes a more holistic approach to anesthesia billing consulting.

Contract Negotiation

When we on-board a new client one of the first things we often find is that their contracts are woefully out of date resulting in significant underpayments. As the commercial cost of anesthesia goes up, so should the amount in your pocket – but if contracts are left unchanged you’re getting short-changed.

We can provide you with the data and negotiating partner that you need to help ensure that your contracts are as favorable as possible:

• Insurance contracts: We have a clear understanding of the payment trends and the competitive landscape in each region. We can bring reams of data to the table to support your rate increases and help you negotiate the best deal possible with each of the major payors in your area.
• Hospital contracts: Negotiating a hospital contract can be intimidating, but we can provide both sides of the table with data and insights that transform confrontational zero-sum negotiations into a mutual exploration of win-win options. For example, Fusion Anesthesia can provide room utilization data that might show a specific surgeon reserving an OR 5x per week but only using it 3x per week. Hospitals generally don’t have this kind of data or the time to really analyze it, but by working together both sides save money—increasing the overall pot that can be spent on your services.
• Stipends: By backing you up with a combination of historical data, future projections, and industry averages we can help you propose a stipend formula that appropriately compensates you and your group. We can often find inefficiencies like facility coverage requirements that leave your group underutilized. This allows the hospital to make the decision of dropping those extra coverage requirements or increasing your group’s stipend to compensate you got it.

Scheduling and Efficiency Analysis

Looking beyond contracts, our anesthesia billing consulting can also help you optimize schedules and improve efficiency based on:

• Facility requirements
• Anesthesiologist preferences
• Seniority
• Internal systems
• …and more

We can help independent practices optimize scheduling to ensure each physician is putting in maximum billable hours with as little downtime as possible… while still meeting their own life preferences.

You can look at the big picture or drill down to the finest details including metrics that can help you improve scheduling:

• Block time utilization tool: Shows which surgeons are using (or not using) each OR and how this impacts your practice.
• Room utilization graph: Displays how many anesthesiologists and CRNAs are assigned to ORs at each hour of the day down to the minute.
• Provider concurrency grid: Makes it easy to see how many concurrent cases each anesthesiologist in your practice has taken over the course of the day including details like whether they supervised or performed the service directly.

Using these metrics, we can improve and fully optimize your practice’s schedule within three to six months.

The Final Stretch: Practice Management and Back Office Services

As an independent practice, you want to focus on your cases and your patients. As part of our anesthesia billing consulting services, we provide comprehensive practice management and back office services that let you do just that:

Comprehensive Anesthesia Billing Consultants

By taking a holistic view of our client’s contracts, schedules, and billing processes Fusion Anesthesia typically increases client take-home by 5-15% in the first year we work with them—with no other changes.

Don’t believe us? We’ll give you a no-obligation analysis to show how improving these business components can improve your take-home.