A canceled surgery is undoubtedly frustrating for patients, but it’s also a serious detriment to practice efficiency and revenue. Last-minute cancellations create stress, disrupt schedules and waste resources. In fact, research shows that a single canceled surgery can cost a practice more than $4,500.
Some cancellations—such as a patient developing a fever or severe weather—are unavoidable. But many can be prevented if you have the right processes in place. By implementing the right strategies, you can combat cancellations, safeguard revenue and make the most of your valuable OR time.
Here are four proven ways to prevent canceled surgeries:
1. Ensure patients are scheduled at the right facility
A patient’s demographics and health history may impact where they can receive care. Patients under a certain age—or those with conditions like obesity or untreated obstructive sleep apnea, for example—may be ineligible to undergo surgery at an Ambulatory Service Center (ASC).
If a patient gets scheduled at the wrong type of facility, the surgery will need to be rescheduled, leading to frustrated surgeons, lost revenue and delayed care.
That’s why it’s crucial to triple-check a patient’s medical history before scheduling them for surgery. Be sure to clearly document any conditions that may impact facility eligibility in the patient’s surgical record and on all relevant paperwork.
Better yet, maintain an electronic surgical record to consolidate all your patients’ surgical details in one place. In doing so, you’ll spend less time digging for loose paperwork—and improve your likelihood of selecting the right facility from the start.
2. Complete surgical paperwork and clearances on time
Most surgical schedulers have a million responsibilities to juggle. In addition to scheduling patients, they manage tons of paperwork—including pre-admission testing (PAT), history and physical (H&P) forms and insurance authorizations, just to name a few. With so many tasks to manage, it’s not uncommon for the occasional file to slip through the cracks.
But when pre-surgical paperwork goes missing, there’s often only one outcome: The surgery needs to get canceled and rescheduled.
Fortunately, there’s a solution: Maintain a digital checklist for each surgery. By organizing all your tasks in one place, you can easily see which items have been completed and which are still outstanding.
Some software solutions offer even greater capabilities—such as a dashboard that lets you search for upcoming surgeries and filter the results however you want, including by:
- Date of surgery
- Surgeon
- Coordinator
- Status
- Facility
If that’s not enough, consider building your own reports so you can pull whatever information you need for seamless data management.
3. Streamline prior authorization
Okay, great—you completed all your paperwork on time. Now, it’s time to face your biggest challenge: The insurance company.
Nearly one in three physicians (31%) say their prior authorization requests are “often or always denied,” according to an American Medical Association survey—and that figure may well increase as payers continue integrating AI into their decision-making systems.
When surgeries aren’t approved, they get canceled, and your practice loses revenue. That’s why it’s so important to optimize your front-end processes so you can minimize insurance-related cancellations. Consider these tips:
- Keep a checklist of required approvals for each patient’s insurance provider
- Group pending approvals by insurer to handle multiple cases in a single call, rather than contacting carriers individually for each patient
- Use a centralized scheduling system to effectively track approval status
4. Prevent patient-related errors
Even if you’ve done everything right, sometimes, patients unintentionally cause their own cancellations. A patient who fails to follow pre-surgery instructions—such as eating before anesthesia or taking restricted medications—may end up jeopardizing their eligibility to undergo surgery.
Of course, mistakes happen, and you can’t avoid them entirely. But there are some strategies you can employ to improve patients’ adherence to pre-surgery instructions, such as:
- Provide clear, bold instructions about fasting and medication restrictions well in advance of the patient’s surgery date
- Use multiple communication channels, such as phone calls, emails and text messages, to remind patients how to prepare for their surgery
- Emphasize the potential consequences of non-adherence. (Even a morning cup of coffee can result in a canceled procedure!)
Implementing these tried-and-tested strategies should help you keep avoidable cancellations to a minimum. But sometimes, canceled surgeries are inevitable. That’s why it’s worth keeping an up-to-date tracking system so that when cancellations happen, you can quickly fill the open slot (and reschedule the original patient) to avoid lost revenue.
Learn how Surgimate can help you reduce cancellations, maximize block time and accelerate patient care.
