Patient experience is already tied to how CMS reimburses your facility, regardless of which survey your organization uses. What’s less obvious is how much of that experience gets shaped before a patient ever sees a discharge nurse, in the pre-op consult, the induction, and the wake-up, by the anesthesia team most administrators rarely think about until something goes wrong.
The Real Financial Driver
Deloitte’s Center for Health Solutions found that hospitals with “excellent” patient experience ratings averaged a 4.7 percent net margin, compared to 1.8 percent for those with low ratings. A 10-percentage point increase in “top-box” ratings was tied to a 1.4 percent bump in net margin and a 1.3 percent bump in return on assets. Reimbursement incentives only explain about 7 percent of that relationship.
The rest comes from loyalty. Patients who feel well cared for come back for their next procedure, and they tell their friends and family where to go for theirs. That effect holds no matter which CMS program your facility reports to, so the same dynamic applies to a surgery center or a rural clinic even where the specific mechanism looks different. Deloitte’s data also points to where the effect is strongest: interactions with clinical staff, not amenities or facility upgrades.
Where the Anesthesia Team Wins or Loses That Number
Most administrators picture the surgeon or the floor nurse when they think about patient experience. For a surgical patient, the anesthesia encounter often shapes the whole memory of the visit, since it bookends the procedure itself.
A study published in BMC Anesthesiology found that when patients are asked what worries them most about surgery, postoperative nausea and vomiting consistently ranks near the top of the list, often above pain. A 2026 study of pre-anesthesia consultations found that 83.2 percent of patients reported satisfaction with that conversation, and 77.6 percent reported measurably reduced anxiety, driven largely by how much time the provider spent and how clearly they communicated.
Both of those sit squarely inside what your anesthesia team controls, in the ten minutes before a patient goes under and the hour after they wake up.
Where AANW Comes In
That gap, between what actually moves the number and what most staffing arrangements are built to optimize for, is the problem AANW exists to solve.
Most anesthesia staffing arrangements are built to solve a scheduling problem: who covers which room, on which day. Our anesthesia staffing model treats communication and continuity as part of the same equation, because the research above says that’s what actually moves your margin, not just who happens to be available for a shift. In practice, that means matching experienced anesthesiologists and CRNAs to a facility’s actual case volume and culture, then building schedules that bring the same faces back rather than rotating in whoever is free.
The Risk Side of the Same Coin
Communication doesn’t only move satisfaction scores. It moves liability exposure, too.
A landmark study in JAMA found that physicians who got sued and those who didn’t weren’t reliably separated by the quality of care they gave. They were separated by how they communicated, specifically by spending more time with patients and explaining what to expect. That finding scales across every provider a patient interacts with, anesthesia included.
A team trained and supported to communicate well isn’t just protecting a survey score. It’s reducing your institution’s exposure the next time an outcome doesn’t go as planned, which is part of why continuity, not just coverage, is central to how we staff a facility.
Consistency Is the Multiplier
None of this holds up if your anesthesia coverage rotates constantly. A revolving cast of locums makes it much harder to build the kind of rapport that shows up in outcomes and in your patient experience scores alike. Every new face has to rebuild trust with your surgical staff and your patients from zero.
AANW’s staffing model is built around retention rather than filling the next open shift. For rural and community facilities in particular, where a single anesthesia team may be the constant across an entire surgical program, that stability is the difference between a patient experience strategy that compounds over time and one that resets every few months. In a small community served by a single surgical program, word about a bad experience can travel fast, and so does word about a good one.
Where to Go From Here
Patient experience is tied to your margin and to your reputation in the communities you serve, and your anesthesia program plays a bigger role in both than most staffing decisions account for.
If you want to talk through what that looks like for your hospital, surgery center, or clinic, contact our team directly. We work with facilities across Oregon and Washington to build anesthesia programs around exactly this problem.
