With ASCs increasing their ability to perform procedures at lower costs than hospitals, Andrew Shadid, CEO of Chicago-based Genesis Orthopedics & Sports Medicine, said his practice is determined to provide care to those with the greatest financial need.
This is an edited transcript. Download the full podcast episode here.
Question: What makes your practice unique?
Andrew Shadid: We're on a mission to increase access to orthopedic care for all people, including those that are uninsured — those that we traditionally think can't afford our services as one of the most expensive specialties.
Q: That's a fascinating mission. How are you able to do that and make it make financial sense for your center as well as the community at large?
AS: Our practice was probably like most for 20 years since our founding in which we took care of the patients that really made financial sense. We looked at the issue of rising Medicaid numbers and uninsured numbers. … And as we learned more and more about the economics of healthcare, but also about the social despair that many of these patients had, we decided that we needed to make this part of our mission. We started taking on more and more patients of different socioeconomic backgrounds, with probably what many people would call a worse payer mix.
We just call it a different one. This different payer mix required us to really think of a different economic model to service that, and we've spent the last five years really trying to craft what that model looks like. Ironically, it's using a lot of the things that we saw making headlines back during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is telemedicine and what we call a theme of having people operate at the top of their license so that you're not asking expensive labor to do things that other people can be doing. But it's caused us to have to really rethink our operating model from the beginning in order to make a successful care delivery model that at the end of the day pays all the bills and hopefully rewards the physician for their innovation.