To survive in such a tumultuous industry, ASCs must get creative when coming up with solutions to their problems.
Brett Maxfield, CRNA, director of Madison Avenue Surgery Center in Idaho Falls, Idaho, connected with Becker's to discuss the biggest problems ASCs are up against and possible solutions.
Note: These responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What is the biggest problem ASCs face today?
Brett Maxfield: The common struggle that I see with everyone is that there is a significant rise in costs post-pandemic with a decrease in revenue overall.
Everybody is fighting the same battle where staffing costs just really skyrocketed and the cost of supplies and medications also skyrocketed. But at the same time, we had a decrease in return as far as payer mixes falling off where there was a lot lower reimbursement and just within the insurances and different things along those lines as well. We also had a fall off where lots of insurance companies have decreased their reimbursement for the same procedures they were doing previously. So [those are] the two factors that have really contributed to a big struggle for all the ASC I've talked to.
Q: What are some ways ASCs can mitigate these issues?
BM: The ASCs that I see really succeeding are ones that have gotten creative. The traditional approach just isn't working as well. We learned with the pandemic that this disruption in the supply chain can really wreak havoc and cause skyrocketing costs. If your usual supply chain is disrupted and you have to go looking for [what we call] the pharmacy pirates that are charging $400 for a drug that used to be $40, it just absolutely skyrockets those costs. So a lot of the surgery centers that I've seen that have been able to flourish have gotten creative in their staffing and in their purchasing and in the way that they're doing things. They've really kind of gone back in and re-evaluated everything to be honest.
One of the things I've seen quite frequently is cross training staff members. Staff members who typically had just been in the operating room are now cross trained to do the recovery room and to do calls and different things like that. Unfortunately, it does place a higher burden on surgical center staff, but it does reduce the total overhead when you can streamline operations a little bit more and really kind of tighten things up, especially within staffing. That tends to be the biggest expense that we have some control over. The other thing has been just being really, really frugal in the supply chain management, making sure that you don't have a bunch of waste that's outdated and having to be disposed of and just being very, very careful to have enough in reserve to continue operations but not to over purchase.