Michael Grant, CEO of the Surgery Center of Amarillo (Texas), joined Becker's to discuss how his ASC is tackling financial challenges.
Question: How is your ASC tackling financial challenges right now?
Editor's note: These responses were edited lightly for clarity and length.
Michael Grant: Definitely an interesting time for ASCs with lots of different financial challenges. We have really tried to focus on three things:
- Increasing our revenue per procedure by performing higher-acuity procedures such as outpatient bariatric weight loss procedures; orthopedic total joint replacements and sports medicine procedures; cardiology, focusing on cardiac rhythm management; and pain management procedures.
- Decreasing our supply costs by renegotiating vendor contracts and trying to streamline all providers to one or two vendors for each product category. By having a higher spend commitment with one or two vendors for each category, we are able to get better upfront pricing and a rebate structure in place.
- Cross-training our registered nurses to be able to perform multiple roles throughout the facility, so if we face staffing challenges we have multiple nurses that can work in recovery, preoperative, registration and the operating room. We are able to maximize staffing each day by having the staff cross-trained in different areas of the organization. This helps lower the use of pro re nata nurses and part-time staff and reduces staffing costs overall. We use several staff change roles throughout the day to maximize efficiency.