In a recent blog post, Antonia Finlayson, VP Marketing, Specialty Sales at Medline Industries, Inc., reviews 4 challenges confronting ASC surgeons.
Challenges exist and opportunities abound. That sums up the current climate for America's ambulatory surgical centers, according to the ASC surgeons' roundtable at Becker's ASC 22nd Annual Meeting – The Business and Operations of ASCs.
Hosted by Medline, the October 2015 roundtable invited ASC surgeons/surgeon-owners to discuss the biggest challenges facing their centers and share ideas on how they are navigating them in the current healthcare climate.
There was plenty of good news. Overall, ASCs are experiencing high favorability with physicians, patients and other stakeholders, surgeons said, citing greater efficiency, better procedural turnover time, superior quality of nursing staff and greater patient satisfaction.
Simultaneously, ASCs are challenged with recruiting physicians, managing hospital partnerships and addressing the financial implications of the Affordable Care Act. Here's what participants said about these issues.
Managing Hospital Relationships
There are many reasons surgery centers partner with healthcare systems – or at least explore the possibility of doing so. Hospital systems have deeper pockets than most teams of physicians, they can provide inexpensive or rent-free facilities right on campus or nearby, and they have an established patient base.
But several roundtable participants suggested that, even with a working financial partnership, the hospitals may be reluctant to share their surgeons and patients. If a procedure can be performed in house, hospitals want to keep it there. One surgeon said he felt his hospital partner sees his practice as more of a rent-paying tenant than as an equal partner. In addition, partnerships between ASCs and smaller or individual hospitals tend to be rockier than those between ASCs and larger hospital systems, said a California surgeon. There is also some variation in partnership success based on the region. To choose the right partner, it helps to do your homework or use a consultant or legal partner with strong industry knowledge to assist in the analysis. Click here to continue>>