Administrator of Grand Rapids-based Surgical Center of Michigan Kris Kilgore discusses the biggest technical challenges for ASCs with out EMR.
Ms. Kilgore will speak at the Becker's ASC 25th Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, October 18-20, 2018 in Chicago. Click here to learn more and register.
Question: What is the biggest issue your ASC is facing today? What strategy are you using to overcome it?
Kris Kilgore: Capturing our utilization and capacity as we are not on an EMR. We are looking at ways to generate reports from our EPM System. We keep a "shared calendar" in outlook that all of the surgical schedulers have access to. When a physician requests time off for vacation or to attend conferences, his/her unused or open block surgery time is placed on the shared calendar. When the surgical schedulers note that the physician they schedule for is scheduling more than three weeks out, they request additional surgery based on the "open" surgery time, indicated on the shared calendar. This helps to improve our utilization.
Q: How is value-based care affecting your ASC or your plans for the future?
KK: We are constantly looking at ways to be more efficient and cost effective by standardization of supplies, instruments and equipment, not over-ordering and then discarding expired items. We are currently working on instituting a computerized inventory system to allow us to do case costing, share supplies with our other ASCs and increase our buying power to help decrease our pricing with vendors and GPOs due to increased volume.
Q: Over the next 2-3 years, what is the biggest opportunity for growth of your ASC?
KK: Utilization of Fridays and bringing in new physicians to utilize our ASC.