Shifting Spine Interventional Pain Injections From the Hospital to a Clinic Setting: Increased Efficiency and Decreased Health System Costs

Abstract Objective Spine interventional pain injections have dramatically increased in volume in the past three decades. High referral volumes at our institution necessitated using both a hospital-based interventional suite and a clinic-based suite scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis. We sought to determine whether the clinic-based suite provided benefits in efficiency and health system cost in comparison with the hospital suite without compromising quality of care. Methods To investigate differences between outpatient procedures performed in hospital-based procedure rooms (HBPRs) and clinic-based procedure rooms (CBPRs), we reviewed all consecutive outpatient spine interventional pain procedures performed by the interventional neuroradiology service over a 12-month period. We analyzed procedure complexity, fluoroscopic times, procedural times, patient wait times, and health system costs for each case, as well as any complications. Results Our analysis demonstrated similar procedural complexity between sites with decreased average fluoroscopic time (112 seconds versus 163 seconds, P = .002), procedural time (17 min versus 28 min, P 14 times the amount to perform than in the CBPR. Discussion Performing spine interventional pain procedures in a CBPR adds value by decreasing procedural, fluoroscopic, wait times, and health system cost compared with an HBPR without compromising safety.