Relative value guide basic units in operating room scheduling to ensure compliance with anesthesia group policies for...

Many anesthesia groups provide services in a spectrum of anesthetizing locations, including offices, free-standing ambulatory surgery centers, diagnostic clinics, and traditional hospital operating rooms. The use of a uniformly understood measure of case complexity could assist an anesthesia group in ensuring appropriate anesthesia provider expertise and equipment availability at each anesthetizing location. In this article, we show how the American Society of Anesthesiologists' Relative Value Guide (ASA RVG) basic units can be used as a criterion to establish the maximum level of complexity of cases performed at each location by an anesthesia group. By reviewing ASA RVG basic units at several anesthetizing locations in lowa, we found that ASA RVG basic units differ among sites. The ASA RVG basic units can be used to identify cases that are seemingly unexpected for an anesthetizing location. There are several reasonable values that an anesthesia group can use for its maximum number of basic units at an anesthetizing location.