With outpatient surgery volume poised to grow about 11 percent over the next four years, practices must focus on showing payers and surgeons they can achieve superior long-term clinical outcomes, according to Surgical Directions CEO Jeff Peters.
At Becker's ASC 25th Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, Oct. 18-20 in Chicago, Mr. Peters discussed growth opportunities for ASCs and how to manage them.
Here are three growth areas he identified:
1. Vascular procedures are moving into the ASC setting, Mr. Peters said. The problem is that because many vascular procedures are for Medicare patients with comorbidities, they're typically high-risk procedures with low margins. But if ASCs do diagnostics for those types of procedures, the area becomes a high-margin, high-volume opportunity with good outcomes.
2. Neurosurgery is another opportunity for ASCs. Payers have noticed two-year outcomes of major neurosurgery procedures have a high failure rate with little to no decline in pain, often leading to addiction. However, by performing these procedures minimally invasively, ASCs could get the same results at a lower cost while paying careful attention to opioid risks.
3. Urology is also a promising new frontier. Mr. Peters recently visited a center that performed 10 prostatectomies a week with all commercial payers and "incredible" margins.
In every one of these areas, he said, the focus has to be an obsession with value. Practices that use data to prove they're in the 90th percentile or higher for outcomes and patient satisfaction will receive higher reimbursement from payers — and payers will funnel patients to those centers.
Creating high satisfaction requires providers to begin managing the episode of care immediately, and to continue engaging with patients postoperatively to immediately address any issues. Every person in an ASC must also convey a high level of caring the moment a patient walks in the door, Mr. Peters said. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago and visited Buffalo, N.Y.-based Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center for treatment, he experienced this firsthand.
"There was a level of caring that extended through that entire experience that I'll never forget. I actually wrote letter to the president of the hospital telling him how good a job it is," Mr. Peters said. "[If] the patient can sense they're going through a checklist, as opposed to having an experience, that's going to come out in the patient satisfaction score … and you're not going to hit that 90th percentile and you're not going to have the payers steering people to you."