Shannon Yarrow, senior vice president of managed care at Brentwood, Tenn.-based Surgery Partners, joined "Becker's ASC Review Podcast" to talk about why physician independence is good for payers.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here.
Question: What do you anticipate from payers in the coming years as they continue to drive procedures to the outpatient setting?
Shannon Yarrow: One of the unique things about Surgery Partners is we are not one of the large surgical companies that's owned by a larger health system or a payer. We have some competitors that are aligned with those types of organizations. As an independent, we can be more agile, I think. We're not threatening, necessarily, to some of the payers, when you think about [for example] a Blue Cross working with a surgery center company that's owned by one of their competitors. That might be a little more concerning to them than it is to work with an independent.
One of the other great things about this organization is that we tend to work with our physician partners who are also independent physicians. So we work a little differently because we work with those independents and try to keep our physicians independent, giving them opportunities for additional distributions through successful ASC ownership. So it's just a little bit of a different model, and I'm hopeful that payers will continue to support our independence.
I think the payers in general would like to keep more physicians independent, because as the physician community starts to become more employed, what they're finding is that the cost of care can go up because, of course, those employed physicians are aligned more closely with the larger health systems that employ them.