Raleigh, N.C., has seen extensive ASC growth in the past year — its population has increased 18.7 percent since 2010.
Brain Bizub, the CEO of Raleigh (N.C) Orthopaedic Clinic, joined Becker's Ambulatory Surgery Centers Podcast to talk about the growth of his center and the ASC trends he's following.
Here is an excerpt from the podcast. Download the full episode here.
Editor's note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Question: What three trends should ASC industry leaders follow closely today?
Brian Bizub: The first one is benchmarking patient satisfaction, data collection and whatever else you can collect. You can then dissect it and find what your strengths and weaknesses are.
Patient satisfaction is obviously a huge marker for an ASC. They're our marketing step. Primarily, they're the ones going out saying, 'Have your surgery at ASC, don't have it at the hospital' — benchmarking our ASC against other ASCs.
Next is looking at reimbursement and bundled payments — whether bundles make sense for an ASC, or whether they end up being programs that work for a few years but then reimbursement is so reduced that your profit margin gets even smaller in the long run.
The other thing I would pay attention to is what President Joe Biden's administration is planning. The House has a bill to hopefully eliminate the Provider Relief Fund tax. We got a penalty from the money that we received to help us through the pandemic.
I'm not quite sure how much more stringent they could be putting price-transparency laws in place, which I'm a big fan of. I think patients should have the right to know what a procedure costs. However, what they don't have in most of the transparency models that I've seen on the hospital level is the quality indicators that go along with that. As we all know, pricing is a huge factor in the world today, and everyone's looking at it based on high deductibles and HSA plans.