Optimizing a Surgical Practice from Start to Finish

Abstract

Relative to other nations, health care in the United States is costly, poorly coordinated, and underperforms across a spectrum of qualitative metrics [1]. Current health care expenditures (2019) represent a $3.8 trillion dollar cost to the US economy, an increase of 4.7% over the previous year [2]. Of these expenditures, surgical and hospital-based procedures and care comprise the largest proportion. Despite 80 million surgical procedures being performed annually, and at enormous cost, our delivery system is plagued by systemic inefficiency, fragmentation, and wide practice-to-practice variations in quality, cost, and perioperative care plans [3].