An endorsement by the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation lends more weight to a solution for use of anesthesia information management systems as a means of optimizing medication management and data collection. Another popular solution can be found in the 2006 development of the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and its ongoing evolution of the program and increasing traction among providers.

“CMS has recently enacted changes to reward hospitals with increased reimbursement for higher quality and to penalize organizations through lower reimbursement for poor quality,” Goldberg says.


At Fairfax Hospital in Virginia, more than 50,000 surgeries are performed each year. Without an AIMS system in place, this creates 50,000 separate paper records. That leads to some big questions: How do you mine the paper record to ensure compliances with these practices? How do you mine a paper record for resource consumption?

“Automated systems create a more valid and true rendering of what’s going on with a patient, and help us record data more infallibly and accurately than we do via paper. We can spend less time charting and more time focused on the patient,” says Goldberg. “The key is to deliver an application that’s pleasing to the anesthesiologist and does not distract from care. The interface must be easy to learn and cannot be tedious to use, otherwise doctors will default to paper.”

Anesthesiologist Jeffrey S. Plagenhoff has extensive experience using an AIMS at Southeastern Alabama Medical Center, where the system has been in place for five years.

“It offers a tremendous amount and in the big picture, there is no logical defense for why we should fight to stay with paper and pen,” Plagenhoff says. “We are being tasked to take quality of care and cost of care to new levels. To think that you can reduce cost and improve quality of care without more data and better data analysis and easier reporting is a ludicrous position to defend. You have to have computerized records.”

Plagenhoff says enhanced compliance will lead to a bevy of benefits, including enhanced efficiency analysis, which in turn, leads to a reduction of errors.

“The AIMS must take up as little space as possible in the crowded OR, must ensure transfer of anesthesia-related information from pre-op to OR to PACU, and must support connectivity for increasingly ‘mobile’ anesthesiologists—across multiple ORs at a single hospital, across hospital systems, in ambulatory surgery centers, and at physician offices,” Goldberg says.

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