Clinical Research Division

Capital Anesthesia Partners' Clinical Research Division conducts research that improves anesthesia and gastroenterology outcomes and reduces surgical risk in the outpatient endoscopy setting.  To date, we have conducted nine research studies and have published some of our results.

Research Team

Anesthesia practices typically just conduct internal meetings as part of their quality program.  Our research activities are very different.  All members of the patient care team participate in our quality program.  In addition to physician anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, CAP's integrative quality program includes surgeons, gastroenterologists, registered nurses, technicians, and ASC center directors.  Our team is supplemented by statisticians and experts in study design.  By including all members of the care team, problems are addressed and solved quickly and efficiently, resulting in a higher level of control of the anesthesia program.

Research Protocols

We engage in research projects that have direct effects on our patient care and the delivery of healthcare services.  Our research focuses not only on anesthesia care related factors, but also factors that are important to our surgeon/proceduralist partners and our facilities.  We have designed studies to identify and reduce risk associated with airway events that occur during endoscopic procedures.  Our results have modified patient care in both our core anesthesia practice as well as our client facilities in other geographic areas.

Research Findings

Some of our findings include:

• Patients turned supine (on their back) at any time during an endoscopic procedure were 4.3 times more likely to experience an airway event.
• "Double procedures" (where a Colonoscopy and Upper Endoscopy are performed at the same time) were more than two times as likely to result in an airway event than if either procedure was performed in isolation. Read more.

Published Work

Congratulations to Steven Saltzman, MD, our chief medical officer, and Aamir Ali, MD and Michael Weinstein, MD, two of our referring gastroenterologists from Capital Digestive Care, who were selected to present our clinical research about increased risk for adverse respiratory outcomes during "double procedures" at the American College of Gastroenterologists annual conference in San Antonio.

Please contact us for more information about our research.