Building an Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) from the ground up means finding real estate, designing the facility, selecting equipment and much more.
Becker’s Healthcare recently spoke with Mark Bezjak, President of the Americas at Zimmer Biomet, to talk about the process and challenges in successfully building an ASC.
Question: What are key considerations and challenges that leaders have to address when planning to build and successfully open an ASC?
Mark Bezjak: Patient care is shifting away from the hospital, and that shift has only accelerated since the pandemic.
When it comes to building an ASC, one critical component is financial planning. Whether you’re an integrated delivery network, hospital system or physician group, how will you make the investments needed to purchase land, fund construction and buy capital equipment? Not only do you need to secure capital, but you also need to anticipate patient volume and what type of patients to serve in an efficient way.
Another factor is real estate. Where in the community will your ASC serve your patients best? To understand this, conducting local market research will help you identify the right place.
Are you considering owning the land or leasing? Will you go in on it alone? Will you create a partnership team or develop a joint venture with a healthcare system?
Lastly, facility design. The overall schematic needs to be efficient to facilitate patient flow, technology integration, and reduced sterilization burden. For example, are you planning for a smart operating room? Do you want to use a ROSA® Robotic Knee replacement system? What capital equipment considerations do you need to get the ASC up and running? And, Sterile Processing Departments (SPDs) continue to be a bottleneck within ASCs. How can you be more efficient in delivering the products that are needed for surgery?
Q: What led to the partnership between Zimmer Biomet and CBRE, and how do you foresee this collaboration benefiting the development of ASCs?
MB: We are very excited about the collaboration. Zimmer Biomet is one of the world’s largest musculoskeletal organizations — we’re an implant company, a technology company and a data company. We think of our partnerships with physicians from end to end, which includes the total continuum of care.
It’s important for us to continue to build relationships with our physicians. We have conversations with physicians who say, “I want to open an ASC. How do I do it?”
What drove us to develop a partnership with CBRE was the desire to offer physicians a turnkey solution for building an ASC — from financial planning, developing financial models to real estate selection and facility design.
CBRE is a respected global real estate services and investment company that includes a well-defined healthcare portfolio. It’s their expertise in location intelligence, real estate, architecture, construction and design services that will support physicians looking to increase their footprint and get to that first case in the ASC as quickly as possible.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you envision this partnership will evolve to meet ASCs’ future growth needs? What’s exciting you here?
MB: We believe that in the very near future, between 30% and 40% of orthopedic procedures will be performed in the ASC setting. The key is to help physicians with financing, real estate and facility design, and then institute an efficient model on top of that.
Zimmer Biomet products across technology, robotic surgery systems and a smart implant all help physicians operate efficiently and deliver best-in-class outpatient procedures. We equip physicians with intra-operative and post-operative solutions that promote efficiency, whether it’s getting the patient ready pre-operatively with the mymobility® app, using ROSA to assist with smart implant placement or tracking the patient postoperatively to monitor recovery with Persona IQ® The Smart Knee® Implant.
We’re able to truly differentiate ourselves in the market through Zimmer Biomet’s partnerships with CBRE and physician-partnered ASCs. These facilities deliver best-in-class all the way across the physician, implant provider and CBRE as a partner. Patients want to go to those ASCs because they know they will get high quality care, implants and technology.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers?
MB: We’re very proud of what we’re doing. The site-of-care shift is here and we want to bring solutions to our industry partners.
We’re looking across the entire spectrum of what physicians need to manage and run an ASC. I believe we’re well positioned to deliver worldclass service in an outpatient setting. Each solution is tailored to the individual physician because it’s not a broad-brush stroke. We put on our consultative hats, understand the surgeon’s goals and determine what offerings are needed from the time a physician decides to open an ASC to caring for patients post-operatively. Our approach is centered around patient outcomes. That’s the key.