"Patient satisfaction" and the patient experience are considered key measures of quality and performance in our increasingly value-based healthcare system. The American Society of Anesthesiologists' Committee on Performance and Outcomes Measurement (ASACPOM) has acknowledged that "monitoring of patient satisfaction has already been incorporated int...

Citing eye-opening statistics from the American Society of Addiction Medicine indicating 52,404 fatal drug overdoses in 2015, healthcare leaders are calling for a multi-pronged effort in combatting the opioid epidemic in America. With their deep pharmacological expertise and clinical experience, anesthesia providers and pain specialists are eminent...

Press releases following a recent publication in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) hysterically echoed the article's headline: "Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the U.S."1 The authors used a variety of published sources on the incidence, lethality and preventability of medical errors to produce an estimate of 251,000 deaths per yea...

The 2018 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Federal Register on November 15, 2017 has set a national conversion factor (CF) of $35.9996 for non-anesthesia services. This includes all evaluation and management codes as well as all surgical procedures. This represents a 0.5 percent po...

The typical anesthesia practice now includes a combination of traditional hospital facilities and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), endoscopy centers and other outpatient venues such as doctors' offices. With the continued migration of surgical cases from inpatient to outpatient place of service, a variety of service locations is considered essent...