We’re committed to providing high-quality, cost-effective care: G&G Anesthesia’s reliance on its network-supported clinical teams is a boon

“The ability to demonstrate we make an impactful difference in the care of our patients begins with data. – Tom Hopkins, MD, President & CEO, G&G Anesthesia”

G&G Anesthesia is an Nashville, TN- based leading anesthesia provider that modernizes traditional anesthesia services to improve patient outcomes. G&G has been working with hospitals across the United States for more than 10 years to provide 24/7 on-site anesthesia management solutions and industry-leading clinical support that reduces overall costs while ensuring maximum clinical and operational coverage.

The company specializes in pioneering anesthesia services lines that are customized to each medical facility or surgery center’s unique needs and challenges. Through a collaborative approach, G&G improves quality, safety, satisfaction, and clinical outcomes to any medical facility.

Since its beginning, G&G has been committed to establishing best practices, pursuing innovation, and elevating the standards of the anesthesia industry.

G&G was founded in 2010.

The Silicon Review reached out to Frank Grasso, CRNA, Founder of G&G Anesthesia, and Tom Hopkins, MD, President & CEO of G&G anesthesia. Here’s what they had to say.

Interview Highlights

Q. How is the industry you serve currently evolving? Where does G&G stand at the moment?

The healthcare service industry is evolving rapidly. Over the past several years, there was a shift to a clincial care delivery model that links quality, safety and efficiency with value. The practical equation (Value = Quality/Cost) suggests that improving value should be our aim and today’s healthcare economic climate demands we offer a value-added service to hospitals.

G&G was founded upon an ambitious vision to enhance community health through the innovative deployment of evidence-based, cost-effective anesthesia services. The company is in its second decade of service, having achieved national growth through an intense focus on perioperative safety, quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This focus, coupled with expertise in clinical quality, clinical informatics, leadership development, and operational effectiveness gives G&G the talent, knowledge, and tools necessary to offer high-value perioperative anesthesia services.

Q. How does G&G transform traditional anesthesia services and improve patient outcomes?

G&G leverages our proprietary data acquisition, aggregation, and visualization platform to gain insight into how our provider practice influences perioperative outcomes and cost of care. At partner sites with integrated Anesthesia Information Management Systems (AIMS), such as Epic or Cerner-based platforms, we work closely with hospital data analysts to acquire information on high-value clinical and operational opportunities. We then use our leadership structure to cascade performance information down to our clinical staff and roll up ideason improvement opportunities back to our leadership team. This comprehensive feedback loop allows us to identify cost- improvement opportunities and operationalize targeted initiatives designed to improve performance efficiently and with scalable success.

Q. Can you introduce us to your solutions? What are their key features?

Patient safety and quality of care have been our top priorities from the day we were founded. To ensure we provide your patients with the best care possible, G&G monitors more than 20 quality and safety indicators on every case. Just as important, our anesthesia providers utilize a multi- modal pain management model to drastically reduce the number of opioids prescribed to patients while minimizing the side effects they may experience after their procedure. Some of our safety and quality scores include, 1) Pain management with Total Joint Program in the 95th percentile nationally, 2) Day of surgery case-cancellations at .07%, and 3) First Case On Time Start at above 90%.

Through these metrics, we enhance quality and standardize care for patients to reduce their risks before, during, and after surgery while decreasing their length of hospital stay. In turn, we improve patient satisfaction and reduce overall costs.

Q. Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how G&G helped them overcome those challenges?

A facility we recently partnered with was struggling to find high-quality cost-effective anesthesia services. We quickly identified areas to improve clinical quality and operational efficiency. Prior to our partnership, the facility experienced costly surgical delays (FCOTS below 80% and TOT > 30 minutes) with inefficient perioperative pain management, resulting in patient satisfaction scores two standard deviations below the national average. After taking over the facility, we recruited and trained a highly skilled clinical team to deploy a nerve block program, increasing patient satisfaction rates to 90% while reducing opioid utilization by 50%. Simultaneously, we focused on improved safety and efficiency by integrating our comprehensive core Pre-Anesthesia Testing (PAT) infrastructure with a robust perioperative risk stratification process resulting in decreased surgical delays, improved hospital throughput, and an increase in the hospital’s bottom line.

Q. No doubt G&G is charting new territories in this segment. Given how frequently circumstances change, what plans for transformation are you pursuing to remain relevant now and in the future?

We are committed to providing high- quality, cost-effective care. The ability to demonstrate we make an impactful difference in the care of our patients begins with data. Our reliable clinical informatics team is committed to data capture, aggregation, visualization, and analytics, supporting continuous performance improvement. We collect knowledge across our network to create strong clinical teams who advocate and innovate to deliver improved patient care.

Leadership | G&G Anesthesia

Dr Tom Hopkins, CEO: Dr Tom Hopkins is a physician leader with advanced degrees in business administration and physician executive leadership, as well as international experience speaking, writing, and leading quality, clinical informatics, and value-based care initiatives. Dr Hopkins’ career objective is to define, develop, and disseminate perioperative innovative care-delivery solutions necessary to improve community health at scale.

Frank Grasso, CRNA, Founder: Frank Grasso is a founding member of G&G Anesthesia. Frank has worked within hospitals directly delivering patient care and anesthesia staff management for over 10 years.

As a clinician himself, Frank oversees the implementation of the most current anesthesia practices in the profession and provides the G&G team of anesthesia providers with current anesthesia practice guidelines and direct education.

“We enhance quality and standardize care for patients to reduce their risks before, during, and after surgery while decreasing their length of hospital stay. In turn, we improve patient satisfaction and reduce overall costs.”

“Our reliable clinical informatics team is committed to data capture, aggregation, visualization, and analytics, supporting continuous performance improvement.”