Twenty-eight surgery centers from the downstate New York area attended an event striving to form a collaborative relationship on Nov. 9.
"The goal of the event was to form a communication chain [between surgery centers] so we can call our colleagues and share resources," says Jeffrey Flynn, CEO of New York City-based Gramercy Healthcare Management. Mr. Flynn organized the event hosted by Gramercy Healthcare titled "Meeting of the Downstate Ambulatory Surgery Centers."
Here are four insights about the event:
1. Betsy McCaughey, PhD, chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, a nationwide educational campaign, and former lieutenant governor of New York, delivered the event's keynote address. Mr. Flynn says Dr. McCaughey urged surgery centers to promote themselves to the public as the safer place to have surgery because of the dramatically reduced incidence of post-operative infection.
2. The event's goal was to strengthen the community of downstate area ASCs and start a discussion about a group purchasing alliance so the centers enhance efficiency and save money, according to Mr. Flynn.
"[We] proposed the idea to a group of ASCs that we can all save money on the group purchasing agreement," Mr. Flynn says. "In New York, we don't have a lot of ASCs and we can certainly have more. We can be colleagues, not competitors."
3. The event also included a discussion on forming an alliance with a healthcare staffing agency, Mitchell Martin Healthcare, which would save surgery centers a significant amount of money by training prospective hires on the ins and outs of working in an ASC. Mr. Flynn notes that paying the extra money to have the agency train the nurses early on will yield tremendous savings for ASCs down the line for training per diem nurses.
"The training process can be very extensive and a lot of centers may not realize that. They don't always consider the six to eight weeks of training it takes for each nurse coming into [an ASC]," Mr. Flynn says. "We have worked with Mitchell Martin to get candidates through our centers that can hit the ground running."
4. The event also featured presentation sessions on an array of topics, including ASC supply chain management, using data analytics to improve an ASC's operations, financial benchmarking for ASCs, cybersecurity issues for ASCs and risk management strategies for ASCs, among several others.