It is well known in the ASC industry that the easier a center is to work with, the more desirable it is for physician offices to engage in business. As centers look for new ways to increase their desirability, and in turn pull in more cases, an often overlooked marketability area is surgical case coordination and communication.
Many centers continue to rely on a combination of phone calls and faxes between physician office staff and ASCs to coordinate cases. Information received by the surgery center is then manually entered into its system. Once the case is scheduled, any issues or changes require additional calls and emails to ensure everyone remains up to date. This process is time consuming and very error prone. Buena Vista Surgery Center (BVSC) recently escaped this antiquated cycle by looking to the cloud for a solution.
Since implementing Casetabs’ cloud-based surgery coordination application, BVSC has greatly improved all case-related communication. Information is entered into the online system by physician office staff and immediately accessible to all ASC schedulers.
By making it significantly easier and safer for physician offices to schedule cases at BVSC, the center has experienced a 10 percent increase in case volume. For other centers looking to improve case communication and coordination, and become more marketable, consider these four takeaways based on our experience.
1. Centralized Case Management. The system enables physician offices access to propose cases to our center and share all the pre-clearance documents. Scheduled cases automatically port onto surgeons’ calendars. Everyone necessary for a case including nurses, office staff, surgeons, anesthesiologists and vendor reps are automatically notified of the pending surgery. The system triggers tasks that staff must systematically accomplish as they schedule the patient for surgery and receive all necessary clearances or documents.
2. A Safer, More Efficient Process. Providing an at-a-glance dashboard view of where a patient is in terms of scheduling greatly streamlines processes. Proactive alerts pushed to everyone involved in a case ensure no change is overlooked. Avoidable errors such as wrong side surgery resulting from missed documentation or data entry errors are greatly reduced. The time saved by not having to micromanage each case is significant. Because everyone is looking at the same information, identical content is seen by each person, which again leads to fewer errors.
3. Ensures compliance. A key benefit of bringing surgical case coordination online is physician office schedulers upload consent forms, clearances, history and physicals, and other important case information so that it is immediately available for surgery center staff. A HIPPA-compliant systems ensures files are shared in a highly secure manner.
4. Easy Access, Minimal Effort. With a cloud-based system there is no hardware or software installation. Therefore, it requires minimal effort for physician offices. Schedules are easily accessible and managed by physician office and surgery center staff via a surgery board, computer, tablet or smart phone. Because the system is easy to learn and easy to use, adoption rate is very high.
Since bringing case communication and coordination online, staff at BVSC spend less time on scheduling and overseeing cases and more time marketing the practice and engaging with patients. We have seen a direct path from cloud-based surgery coordination to increased case volume.