CHICAGO, JUNE 5, 2024 — Surgical Directions, the nation’s premier clinician-driven, perioperative, anesthesia, technology, and workforce solutions organization, announces a new proprietary model that helps hospitals and health systems improve their anesthesia group contracting process. Merlin™ Anesthesia ContractCompare highlights the importance of frequent and thorough review of anesthesia contracts held up against a business lens to ensure contracts remain aligned with industry standards and facility needs.
Leveraging decades of experience conducting anesthesia assessments for hundreds of hospitals, Robert Johnson, Managing Director of Anesthesia at Surgical Directions, invented a scoring mechanism that addresses key areas hospitals should include in contracts and adjust based on today’s dynamic anesthesia landscape. “You don’t need to be a lawyer; you don’t even need to be an anesthesia administrator to use the tool. The tool pulls out the most important business concepts and helps you quickly and easily evaluate where it stands, allowing you to optimize the contract before you finalize it with your legal teams,” he says.
Johnson initially developed Merlin™ Anesthesia ContractCompare to accelerate his internal contract review process when advising hospital clients. Recognizing the cumbersome nature of long contracts filled with critical—but easily overlooked—details, Surgical Directions enhanced this model with specific calculations to complete contract evaluations faster that result in more accurate contract improvement recommendations.
By adhering to a specific renewal period, facilities and their anesthesia groups can create a regular dialogue around costs, resources, and responsibilities. Merlin™ Anesthesia ContractCompare allows Surgical Directions to support partners with discussions on relevant contract factors, reviewing over 50 different categories and subcategories including:
- Termination language that provides transparency and security without coverage lapses
- Clear language around exclusivity and co-terminal conditions
- Proactive agreements regarding restrictive covenants, non-competes, and non-solicitation
- Specific and flexible financial terms, including how a subsidy is calculated and adjusted
- Standardization around quality and performance metrics, including evaluation and application
Having benchmarked this model against more than seventy-five facilities, Surgical Directions is able to identify and illustrate best practices for anesthesia contract terms and conditions. “We cannot emphasize enough the importance of fully understanding what is in your anesthesia group’s contract,” says Dr. Jason Klopotowski, Lead Physician Managing Director. “Optimizing anesthesia contracts has become critical to decreasing the cost of medical care for all facilities as the shortage of physician anesthesiologists and CRNAs becomes more acute. Merlin ™ Anesthesia ContractCompare helps administrators and groups draft strong contracts, make more informed amendments and revaluate renewals or evergreen contracts to drive transparency, trust, stability, and economic benefit for both parties.”
The importance of using a tool like this is highlighted in one of Surgical Directions’ most recent clients, a Level-One trauma center in the Midwest. Using Merlin™ Anesthesia ContractCompare helped the hospital and anesthesia group save over $6 Million in costs while simultaneously losing zero clinicians during the sixth-month renegotiation period. Additionally, it can be used to review any physician services contract to help optimize terms for the practices, the hospital and ASC facilities.
“Workforce shortages and locum costs continue to rise, increasing the cost of healthcare for everyone. Optimizing needs, OR usage, surgical access and other important surgical services metrics allows you to improve your coverage while also decreasing costs,” explained Leslie Basham, President and CEO of Surgical Directions. “We are thrilled to offer our partners a proprietary solution that helps them improve their contracts while simultaneously improving care, access, and patient experience.”
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ABOUT SURGICAL DIRECTIONS
Surgical Directions is a healthcare solutions company that has partnered with over 500 health systems, provider groups and ASCs. We collaborate to improve perioperative, procedural and anesthesia services. Surgical Directions helps clients enhance profitably and growth through consulting and workforce solutions powered by their proprietary software, MerlinTM. Our peer-to-peer leadership, clinical process expertise and predictive analytics help healthcare organizations tackle critical issues. Our clients achieve improvements in financial performance, culture, engagement, access and, most importantly, patient care. Additional information is available at www.surgicaldirections.com.
