Six administrators shared with Becker's ASC Review their biggest priorities for the new year.
Editor's note: These responses were edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
Suzi Cunningham. Administrator of Advanced Ambulatory Surgery Center (Redlands, Calif.): My top priorities for 2022 are to update our payer contracting and to continue to expand our service lines to include more complex spine and joint [procedures]. With the challenges that 2020 and 2021 brought, it has been very difficult to get some of our payers back to the negotiating table.
Courtney Leslie. Administrator of Truckee (Calif.) Surgery Center: My top priorities for 2022 are implementing price transparency onto our website, bringing on additional service lines to better serve our community and increasing our volume while maintaining a safe and comfortable environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Price transparency is not a requirement for ASCs yet. With our center being majority-owned by a healthcare system, I see this becoming a requirement in the near future. Also, I would love for our community to have that information readily available should they be making a decision on location based on cost. As for bringing in additional service lines, we are working towards the addition of urology, ENT and plastic surgery. The surgeons are here, we just have some work to do to funnel those cases to our facility. Increasing our volumes will come with the addition of those service lines.
John Paoni. Administrator at Franklin Surgical Center (Basking Ridge, N.J.): Our number one priority is safety for all of our patients and staff. Our quality of care providing the best possible outcome is of the utmost importance. It's zero harm for us, so we are instilling better practices with all of our teammates.
Alfonso del Granado. Administrator of Covenant High Plains Surgery Center (Lubbock, Texas): First, although it is tempting to sit back and cruise for a year or two following two tough years, we are actually growth-focused for 2022. We are looking at additional service lines and revenue streams, as well as major investments in these areas. Second, we are also going to be replacing or upgrading existing equipment and instrumentation, plans which were put on hold over the past two years and cannot be delayed any further. Third, we are going to upgrade our data analytics capabilities to improve efficiency across all departments.
Craig Gold. Administrator of Virginia Center for Eye Surgery (Virginia Beach): Since 2021 was a period of high turnover and much of my center's team is still relatively new, 2022 will be a great opportunity to develop staff alignment and cohesiveness. Since I am also relatively new, another priority is to define and examine our existing workflows and look for inefficiencies, redundancies and vulnerabilities.
Mark Spina. Director of Operations at Endoscopy Center of Connecticut (Hamden): My top priority for 2022 is expanding our endoscopy ASC by adding a fourth procedure room to our center. This will involve converting existing space to a procedure room, adding scope clean capacity and moving administrative space to another floor in the building. Will will seek to do the expansion with minimum impact to the center's existing operations. Obviously, this involves a lot of planning and coordination.