A New ASC Nurses's Guide on How to Start a Painless IV

Starting IVs is a crucial part of being an excellent ambulatory care nurse. While painless IV cannulations can be a challenging skill to master, they are vital to your patient’s recovery. Here’s our 5 steps to starting an IV for new nurses (or nurses who need a refresher):

Death by a Thousand Surveys

As a nation, we are over-surveyed and it is killing the value of surveys to give meaningful, actionable intelligence on how to make things better.

Dr. Stephen Punzak: Video is essential for ASCs as complex surgery cases go outpatient

Stephen Punzak, MD, founder and CEO of One Medical Passport, spoke to Becker's ASC Review about the shift of more complex surgeries to the outpatient setting and how ASCs can use technology to enhance patient preparation and recovery.

The best defense: Anesthesiologist Dr. Stephen Punzak on the value of appropriate preop evaluations

Why Capnography Should be Mandatory for MAC and Conscious Sedation

I like to read the ASCA blog every morning. When topics come up that have to do with anesthesia, I will frequently respond. As an anesthesiologist with over 30 years of experience doing everything from open heart and liver transplant, to pain management, OB and fast-paced ambulatory surgery, I’ve pretty much done it all.

5 Tips for A Better GI Patient Experience in Your ASC

According to iDataResearch, approximately 51 million patients in the U.S. underwent GI endoscopies in 2017, of which 19 million were colonoscopies. That’s a whole lotta patients, and the following 5 tips can lead to a better patient experience in your ambulatory surgery center for every one of those patients.

A PreOp Nurse’s Guide to Ejection Fraction and CHF- Part 2

As we learned in Part 1 of this article, EF is one of the most, if not THE most important thing to know about any patient that you are preoping because of the profound implications of EF on a patient’s overall health as well as how the patient will respond to anesthesia.

A PreOp Nurse’s Guide to Ejection Fraction and CHF- Part 1

Disclaimer: I LOVE cardiac physiology. I spent the first decade of my career doing hearts almost every day at the New England Deaconess Hospital. Lots of liver transplants too. With my engineering mindset, cardiac physiology just clicked. However, there are a lot of nurses (and doctors too!) who really don’t understand cardiac physiology. It's a real shame, because cardiac physiology is easy to understand if you’ve been taught “how” things work versus just being given a bunch of numbers to memorize.

An ASC PreOp Nurse’s Guide to Ejection Fraction and CHF – Part 3: Understanding Congestive Heart Failure

In Part 1 of this 4-part series, I talked about what Ejection Fraction (EF) is. In Part 2, I talked about the classifications of normal and abnormal EF. In this 3rd blog article in the series, I’ll talk about Congestive Heart Failure - commonly known as just CHF.

5 Big Changes You Can Make Today to Improve Patient Satisfaction (without spending a nickel!)

Patient satisfaction can make or break the success of your ASC. As an anesthesiologist, I broke down 5 changes you can implement to keep your patients happy without costing you anything!  Here are my thoughts: