SummaryUnited Healthcare has announced a new policy intended to direct a long list of procedures to qualified surgical centers. This may be a positive development for anesthesia practices, even though it may reduce hospital volume.The cost of healthcare is slowly overshadowing other considerations in American medicine. Physicians tend to focus thei...

SummaryAnesthesia groups are increasingly providing services outside of standard anesthetizing locations. They need to do more to properly track these services so that they can have a more accurate assessment of their manpower needs and overall financial standing.In the evaluation of coverage and staffing requirements, the primary focus is always t...

SummaryAnesthesia group presidents and department chairmen are under increasing cultural and contractual pressure to take on more responsibility for the perioperative space, without always being commensurately compensated.Virtually every anesthesia service agreement with a facility includes a section entitled, "Medical Director." This is nothing ne...

Ultrasound in support of post-operative pain blocks is still billable, but are providers doing all that is required? Today's alert provides a reminder of what they must document in order to be paid.If you had mentioned the word "ultrasound" to teenagers back in the 1960s, I suspect they would have thought you were referring to the psychedelic groov...

Conventional wisdom holds that the better-paying cases are migrating from the traditional inpatient setting to outpatient venues. This explains why today's larger practices are so focused on growing their surgicenter business. They view it as a matter of financial survival. Many surgeons will bring their older, sicker Medicare patients to the hospi...