Patient Care For Hip & Knee Surgery Patients

“Patient care is something we foster,” continues Dr. Hartman. “Our personalities are reflected in our environment and in the personnel that work here. We’ve deliberately hand-selected personable individuals who have a direct interest in seeing patients do well. They are all focused on orthopedic care. They know the patients. They know the procedures. They know the post-op care. In a hospital, you can’t control personnel the same way. Here, we’ve fostered an environment that is delightful for our patients.”

“We run on time or ahead of time,” adds Dr. Schaffhausen. “Surgeons come out to talk to the family right after surgery. Because we do so much surgery under very light general or under a block, families are usually able to see their loved ones within 15 to 30 minutes of surgery.”

Putting Hip & Knee Surgery Patients First

For MVSC surgeons, commitment to patient care means a willingness to work continually to improve the patient experience. “Nothing is set in stone,” says Dr. Schaffhausen. “Through all areas of care giving, if something isn’t working right or needs improvement, we make the change. We are always reassessing and re-evaluating. We personally read every patient satisfaction survey and we take them very seriously.”

Dr. Hartman offers a small example of survey-prompted change. “When we first opened,” he says, “we had coffee and tea in our lobby. Isn’t it natural to think that everybody likes coffee or tea? Then we started seeing survey comments from patients who wished we would offer a pop machine or water. So, we put in a pop machine. The complaint went away.”

Other feedback has been more complicated to address. The nursing care, CRNAs and anesthesiologists are absolutely state-of-the-art. We routinely use block techniques that are done by few centers in the country, and that are virtually unknown in many of our local hospitals.

“Our anesthesiologist staff is premier,” Dr. Hartman continues. “We are doing sophisticated Novacain blocks for hip and knee surgery. These blocks are certainly not done in many Minnesota hospitals. One of our anesthesiologists, Dr. Hestness, traveled to Indianapolis to learn a specific block we wanted for our total-knee patients. Without the team of anesthesiologists that we have, I don’t know that you could do major outpatient procedures like knees and hips. Our team does such a phenomenal job with the blocks that patients go home basically pain-free.”

“Our block procedures are very progressive,” agrees Dr. Schaffhausen. “We strive to be on the forefront of administering care in our field.

“We looked at several different outpatient models throughout the country when we were designing our center,” Dr. Schaffhausen explains. “You can learn as much from failures as you can from successes. We used a firm that was skilled at building and managing the kind of center we envisioned. Today, I received a call from a physician in Nebraska who heard about our surgery center. He wants to know how our model works. That’s the way it should be. We learned from other models, and now physicians are learning from our model. There should be camaraderie instead of competition. We are all dedicated to improving the future of medical care.”

“My greatest pleasure,” says Dr. Hartman, “is coming here to work and being in a happy environment. Without happy patients, we don’t have a business. If I had to sum up our surgery center in one word, that word would be compassion.”