I personally don’t think it works, but may work well enough for your shop.
Do you have the volume or the resources to really train a NP well enough? The second part of that equation, how much faith do you have in someone who doesn’t know what we do every day, a NP, an internist or even a cardiologist..... how many medical clearance, cardiology clearance letters we laugh out loud on a daily basis?
I’ve seen this work out at two pervious places that I worked at..... one at an ivory tower, maybe four NPs with one Anesthesiologist. They present every single patient to the attending, basically a medical clinic. They see maybe 10-15 patients 1/2 day at the clinic. They would really gather as much information as possible for the anesthesiologists, and MD would ask for more info as needed, labs, ekg, echo. Etc.
The other was at a smaller hospital. They have one full time NP and residents see patients as needed, but no full time anesthesiologist to really talk through these patients. That NP struggled, because there was no real direction.
The other part of this discussion (i will preface this by, I worked as an internist before anesthesia). Internist/NP/cards have no clue what we do. When I was doing IM eval, a lot of times, I wouldn’t even know what to write or why I am even writing the information down. We had a form that would say the patient is low, intermediate, high risk for the procedure. What does that really mean? I had no clue. You and I and any literate person can read the guidelines, but is that assessment worth the paper they’re printed on? Our EMR recently started to have a pre-populated H&P for hospitalist for our IP patients. They started to assign ASA classification..... GTFOH