Office Tour – Center for Dental Anesthesiology

Dr. James Snyder takes you to a tour around our state-of-the-art dental office in Alexandria, Virginia. In this clip, you can find out what happens during a typical appoint at our office.

DR. JAMES SNYDER: This is Dr. Angela Moss. Dr. Moss is a frequent referrer and making a site visit to find out what happens when her patient's actually arrive here. I'm going to take her on a tour through the office to show her some of the things that we do that may be a little non traditional but are necessary in order to provide a safe experience for patients. Patients have already received by telephone a fair amount of information about our practice. After Dr. Moss makes her referral, patients typically receive also a mailed brochure, which contains biographies of the doctors, some general information about our practices, and some specific information about things that everybody is concerned about. Items such as how will they be able to reach the office, and what are the financial obligations that may or might incur. The anesthesia is really only a tool; the patients are here for dental treatment. The nature of their dental treatment sometimes is known in advance because you have told us on your referral what treatments you would prefer us to complete under general anesthesia. But occasionally the patients come without knowledge of what their dental objectives may be. Well Dr. Moss, this is the treatment area and where the dental treatment as well the general anesthesia is primarily provided. Although we have two operating rooms here, this is our principal room, because in this room we have our BIS monitor. We rely extensively on the BIS monitor to help us accurately measure our anesthetic course. So the good news for patients is that when we are caring for the anesthetic care of a patient, that patient has our complete and undivided attention from the moment they arrive through the front door until the time they're discharged out the back door. Although we have staff members and other doctors who participate in the care, there is little or no handing off in the process. Additionally, because we see patients on a repeat basis we can learn from previous anesthetics what things we would like to alter, the patient's sleep too long, they seem to be nauseas, whatever the things may be, or to tailor things to peoples' new medical conditions because they have now been diagnosed or begun treatment in a different way. So that's an enormous advantage that a hospital based anesthesiologist does not have, where they're taking on all comers and frequently don't have much of an opportunity to follow up with their patients. In those cases where an anesthetic has been performed, we use this as one of our final stage recovery areas. The patients are recovered in the treatment area in such a way that we know they're medically safe. And once we know they're safe and ambulatory, then they're moved about 50 feet down the hall to this room.