Why Anesthesia Benchmarking Has Been Considered Impossible

For years, benchmarking anesthesia and OR performance has been described as either impossible or irrelevant. Leaders frequently point to reasons such as:

  • “We’re a Level I trauma center.”

  • “Our case mix is different.”

  • “Our patients are older and sicker.” 

The problem isn’t benchmarking itself—the problem is using the wrong comparators. 

Traditional benchmarks rely on metrics like bed count, number of licensed ORs, or trauma designation. These inputs look informative, but they do not reflect how hospitals actually function day to day.

 

Accurate Benchmarking Is Based on Peak Operational Throughput

To begin, let's define anesthesia benchmarking as the process of comparing operating room performance, staffing, and throughput against similar facilities to identify opportunities for improvement.

Now, a more meaningful way to benchmark is to look at how many rooms are running at the same time. 

When we analyze concurrent OR utilization, we consistently see that hospitals operating 10 concurrent rooms behave very similarly to other hospitals operating 10 concurrent rooms, regardless of size or label. 

This approach has been validated across millions of records and holds true across:

  • Geography

  • Trauma designation

  • Academic vs. community status 

It also adjusts for seasonality and month-to-month variation. 

In other words, you are unique—but so is everyone else in your true cohort. 

With appropriate baselines, hospitals can see their percentile rank among comparable peers and within their own health system for metrics such as surgical volume, throughput, staffing, and operational variability.


A Better Approach to Benchmarking OR Performance


When benchmarking is grounded in concurrency and peak operational throughput rather than licensed capacity, it becomes practical, comparable, and genuinely predictive. These metrics reflect how a facility actually operates under real-world conditions, not how it is labeled on paper.

In practice, peak operational capacity shows a strong correlation with monthly surgical volume and can be reliably extrapolated to other critical performance indicators, including revenue and staffing cost. As a result, it provides a more accurate lens for comparison than traditional proxies such as facility size, bed count, Case Mix Index, or trauma designation.

With this approach, leaders gain clear visibility into:

  • Where their performance truly stands relative to peer organizations

  • What “good” looks like for facilities with similar operational demand

  • Which levers will most effectively move performance metrics in the right direction

This insight supports decisions around: 

  • Hiring and staffing models

  • Revenue forecasting

  • Capacity planning 

  • Stipend and subsidy negotiations 

Instead of relying on anecdotes or ambitious targets, hospitals can model scenarios using real operating patterns from thousands of ORs that function like theirs.


Busting the Myth

The belief that anesthesia operations cannot be benchmarked simply doesn’t hold up in the era of modern data science. 

With the right tools like Medaxion’s Anesthesia Manager, benchmarking becomes one of the most powerful tools hospitals have to improve access, control rising costs, and support anesthesia teams with staffing that truly matches demand. 

And perhaps most importantly, benchmarking enables leaders to move from gut-feel decision making to evidence-based operational strategy.