In a recent poll on Spine-health.com, patients were split right down the line about whether or not they would consider having spine surgery in an outpatient setting. Safety was the number one concern.
Here are five things to know:
1. Out of 537 respondents, 270 said they would have spine surgery in an outpatient setting and 267 said they would not.
2. The most common reason given for avoiding an outpatient setting was safety concerns.
3. Other reasons cited for avoiding an ASC or outpatient setting included: concerns about available adequate pain management, desire to stay overnight before going home and insurance reimbursement issues.
4. Articles about open surgery techniques tend to receive more readership on Spine-health.com than the corresponding outpatient surgery articles. For example, the main microdiscectomy article gets about 250,000 readers per year, and the outpatient discectomy article gets about 50,000 readers in year — a five-fold difference.
5. Spine-health has seen similar results on Facebook. For example, posts about the above two topics averaged 80,000 and 20,000 readers, respectively — about a four-fold difference. Facebook tends to skew younger, and it's reasonable to assume that this younger demographic would have fewer medical complications and therefore would be less likely to need inpatient emergency services or an overnight stay.
Given the above findings, ASC and outpatient spine surgery marketing programs would likely see improved results if advertising and other outreach address common patient concerns about safety, pain control, insurance and the patient's ability to safely travel home on the day of surgery.
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