Surgeons are increasingly performing procedures in an outpatient setting in Northwest Indiana, according to NWI.com.
Here are four insights:
1. Franciscan Alliances' locations in Crown Point, Dyer, Hammond and Munster went from performing 8,856 inpatient surgeries in 2010 to 6,854 inpatient surgeries in 2015. Its outpatient surgeries increased from 16,123 procedures in 2010 to 20,944 procedures in 2015.
2. Munster-based Community Hospital performs 60 percent to 70 percent of its procedures in an ambulatory setting.
3. Currently, surgeons perform less than 5 percent of lumbar fusions in an outpatient setting. Nitin Khanna, MD, a spine surgeon in Munster, predicts surgeons will perform 80 percent of these procedures in an outpatient setting in five years.
4. "You just have to make sure it's the right procedure and you have the right patient as well," said Richard Berkowitz, MD, medical director of surgery at Community Hospital. "Some patients are very healthy and great candidates to go home the same day. But there's always going to be a subset of patients who have comorbidities and require inpatient surgeries."
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