Having the right staff in the right place can save smaller hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers money when staffing an anesthesia department.

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Anesthesia Staffing Consultants Paragon Service Scholnick Associates

By offering flexibility and a full range of services, Anesthesia Staffing Consultants has become one of the premier anesthesia staffing companies in Michigan. Paul Santoro, the president and CEO who founded the Bingham Farms, Mich.-based company nearly 20 years ago, is looking to take the good reputation he has established with the company and expand beyond state lines in the near future.

“We recruit all the staff, bill for professional services, collect revenue, and manage all the compliance issues with accrediting bodies as well as state and federal regulatory agencies,” Santoro said. “We handle it all from soup to nuts as far as anesthesia services go.”

The company’s primary clients are smaller hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers, which often lack the staffing redundancy to handle service disruptions such as sick calls takes too long to hire staff when there are openings, according to Santoro.

“We’re able to stretch out anesthesia management over multiple facilities, whereas the smaller institutions really can’t afford that kind of infrastructure,” he said. “These facilities can really hit a bump in the road whenever there is a personnel issue.”

Santoro said there a number of examples of facilities that faced potentially dire situations before entering into a contract with his company. “There was a small rural hospital in Northern Michigan that called us in a panic about three years ago,” he said. “It was having a lot of staff turnover, and its revenue and billing collection were certainly not what they should have been.”

In its first year at the hospital, Anesthesia Staffing Consultants recruited a stable core staff and put an efficient management structure in place, Santoro said. In that year, the hospital’s surgery volume increased by 10%, and its bottom-line revenue increased by more than $1 million.

“There was another time we got a call from a surgery center on a Friday afternoon to take over its services on a Monday morning,” Santoro said. “The group it had before had just called it quits, and everything was in chaos. Because of the presence we have in the region, we were able to move in providers and establish new management processes.”

An efficient operation
When Santoro founded the company in 1991, he said it was because he had an entrepreneurial spirit that was better suited to leading his own company than working in a large corporate environment. With that motivation, he was able to pinpoint where much of the growth for his burgeoning business would be in the coming years.

“One of the things I noticed was that Michigan lagged the rest of the nation in the trend toward ambulatory surgery centers,” Santoro said. “That was a market we positioned ourselves to capture, and today, we have exclusive contracts with more than 20 ambulatory surgery centers.”

Even as the healthcare industry has been hit by a rocky economy, unemployment, and insurance issues in the past several years, Anesthesia Staffing Consultants has continued to grow. “Especially in the past five years, we’ve experienced exponential growth,” Santoro said. “As we’ve grown in the region, we’ve been able to create some economies of scale in staffing and management.”

The company has also developed custom practice management software that can integrated into hospital and surgery center OR management systems. The software helps monitor in real time the demand for surgery, allowing the company the flexibility to move staff members where they are needed.

“We never have a surgery without anesthesia, but we also don’t have people sitting on the bench doing nothing,” Santoro said. “Particularly in these tough economic times, it’s important that we’re not paying staff that we’re not using productively.”

Because of the company’s ability to staff efficiently, it can take a contract for anesthesia services at a low-volume center for a straight fee and make it economically feasible. It’s that flexibility, Santoro said, that gives his company an advantage over many of its competitors.

“We’re often called when the bottom drops out for other groups and they find it financially untenable to continue to provide services,” Santoro said. “We’re able to pick up the pieces because of our network of providers and the flexible staffing. The demand and market for anesthesia services is what it is; we’re not going to be profitable by paying people less, we just have to use them more efficiently.”

Looking to grow
Although there are some rigorous regulatory and accreditation requirements that make it difficult to become licensed from one state to the next, Santoro said he has seen some changes in the regulatory process that could help the company compete outside Michigan. “In recent years, there has been a development of alternative sources of accreditation,” he said. “That sensitivity to the marketplace has been helpful, and the accrediting agencies seem more willing to work collaboratively.”

To date, the company has experienced so much growth within Michigan that it has not had to look outside the state. ASC was named a Michigan Top 50 Company to Watch by the Small Business Association of Michigan in 2009. With the potential easing of regulatory practices, however, Santoro said the company is beginning to test the waters for expansion throughout the Greater Great Lakes region.

The company has also improved its Web site and Web presence as part of its marketing and IT initiatives. Santoro said marketing primarily focuses on word of mouth, responding to requests for proposals, direct mail campaigns, and an increased Web presence.

“Our focus on clinical excellence, customer service, and operational efficiency are the pillars of our corporate philosophy,” said Santoro. “By focusing on those pillars, we’ll continue to grow. We’re interested in growing outside the state, and we’re discussing joint ventures with some national companies that could come to fruition by early this year.”