This often-overlooked department is a key contributor to patient safety and revenue. Like many hospital departments, however, Anesthesia and Surgery carry technological challenges that require research and creativity to overcome.

This post outlines the top 3 tech considerations for folding in anesthesia for a streamlined perioperative environment.

Anesthesia and Surgery Require a Specialized Information System

The unique needs of the perioperative environment demand a specifically designed system. It should focus first on patient safety, such as decision support and reminders to ensure compliance with reported indicators, and it should offer efficiencies, such as patient tracking and distributed knowledge.

Because enterprise hospital information systems (HIS) often lag in perioperative functionality, surgeons and anesthesiologists who seek best practices prefer best-of-breed anesthesia information management systems (AIMS) and/or perioperative information management systems (PIMS).

A Perioperative Information System Must Increase Patient Safety

Perioperative systems have intrinsic design features to support safety. For example, decision support systems provide clinicians with time- or process-based reminders to perform specific tasks.

Such tasks might include the administration of pre-surgical antibiotics, ensuring complete documentation, providing a preoperative time-out checklist, or postoperative hand-off.

By integrating anesthesia into the entire perioperative workflow, instead of siloing, clinicians have access to vitals graphing, medication documentation, anesthesia charting, and orders, all within one application, which can help prevent errors and gaps in critical information at the time of care.

Perioperative Is Your Hospital’s Financial Engine

Surgical procedures are the greatest single center of cost and revenue for many hospitals. This is why it's critical to enhance the perioperative environment to decrease costs through improved efficiency and to increase revenue by improving the accuracy and timeliness of documentation.

Ideally, you'll want to invest in one Anesthesia and Surgery system that addresses all 3 of these needs.

MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience

Fully integrated with MEDHOST Perioperative Experience, MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience supports essential aspects of anesthesia care across the perioperative workflow.

Features include:

• Fast and easy in-case access to care documentation
• Automated anesthesia record retention
• Streamlined digital anesthesia care documentation
• The smooth flow of perioperative case information throughout Enterprise

To learn more about how MEDHOST helps hospitals and their clinicians deliver patient-centered care, promote positive outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction, email inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.