ASCs should support private practice physicians, according to Dr. Stefan Kreuzer, owner and founder of INOV8 Orthopedics in Houston.
Dr. Kreuzer joined the Becker's Spine & Orthopedic podcast April 22 to talk about how he sees the ASC industry evolving, his upcoming practice expansion and the payer landscape for orthopedics.
This is an excerpt of the podcast. Listen to the full episode here.
Question: How do you see the ASC industry changing over the next three years?
Dr. Stefan Kreuzer: I think the challenges with the current ASC model with physician ownership is that there's not a really good partnership to support the private practice physician. So I really hope that in the future, the ASC industry will be part of this movement toward supporting the private practice physician because that's what needs to happen. It's in the ASC's best interest, because if you're employed, you can't have ownership in the ASC. I don't know if that's going to happen in the ASC model.
I think ASCs are going to continue to do what they're doing, and it's to try to build ASCs and buy defunct ASCs and try to turn them around. I don't know what's going to happen to the out-of-network model, and we've been saying for 10 years that's going to go away, but it seems to not be going away, which we are vehemently opposed to.
One thing I'm sure of is that the people that have the partnership with the physicians who are willing to move surgical care, such as total joints and spine, to the ASC will be very strong financially. But it requires a physician partnership and requires physician leadership because ultimately they're the person that has the patient that is focused on quality to achieve migrations of these cases. After all, we do take the Hippocratic oath and say, "first do no harm." So if we do a total joint in an ASC and the patient has a bad outcome, uh, that really doesn't help anybody.