Pursuing equal payment to hospital outpatient departments and using technology to increase efficiency are among the trends healthcare leaders recommend ASCs adopt.
Three healthcare leaders connected with Becker's to answer the question: "What trend should ASCs jump on next to be successful?"
Editor's note: Responses were edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Richard Bruch, MD. Board Chair of North Carolina Specialty Hospital (Durham): ASCs should pursue equal payment compared to hospital outpatient department rates. ASCs must perform quality reporting and cost accounting. The quality is there, it just needs to be reported and cost accounting rules have not yet been set to please MedPAC and Medicare.
John Hilinski, MD. Owner and Medical Director of John Hilinski Facial Plastic Surgery (San Diego): [ASCs] should jump on technology adoption for making day to day operations much more efficient. Software programs that have been developed, such as Surglogs, should become integral to all surgery centers. Eventually, the federal government (Medicare) should be able to tap into these software programs to help reduce the burden of compliance and accreditation as well.
Steven Schwaitzberg, MD. Chair of Surgery at UBMD Surgery (Buffalo, N.Y.): If nothing else, the pandemic has taught us to be more nimble and thoughtfully bold than we ever thought was realistic. I think the two trends that [ASCs] should be looking at is outpatient bariatric surgery with definitely moving sleeve gastrectomy and endoscopic sleeve gastrectomy into the ASC and selected gastric bypasses. The most important trend to be followed along with this is to negotiate win-win pricing rather than just outpatient pricing for the ASC since these patients need a lot of care. Equally possible would be outpatient right colectomy. ASCs will need to be able to be able to hit bundled pricing by dealing with issues such as rehydration and the need to keep people out of emergency rooms unless absently necessary.