For the past several years, ambulatory surgery center management and development company Pinnacle III has provided a service to surgery centers seeking an external perspective on their operations. Pinnacle III would receive phone calls and emails from ASCs looking for an expert to come in, analyze their overall operations and identify areas for improvement.
"We hear from facilities that sense there's something wrong, but haven't been able to adequately pinpoint the issues," says Robert Carrera, president of Pinnacle III. "They call us and say 'we need a turnaround' or 'we need help getting back on track.' We go on-site, assess what's wrong and put together a plan of action to resolve the issues we have identified."
Pinnacle III calls this service a "facility audit." When Pinnacle III performs a facility audit, it typically analyzes an ASC's clinical and financial operations (or just one or the other, depending on the request of the client facility). Pinnacle III will determine where there is room for improvement as well as the level of improvement a surgery center could potentially achieve through operational changes. These changes could be in any number of areas of an ASC's operations, including specialty mix, staffing, OR management, coding, billing, collections, financing, partnership mix and managed care contracting.
"Our facility audit provides the client's board of directors with a game plan — a map identifying the areas of concern, the areas of actual deficiency and what requires focus. We sit down with the board, review that game plan and help them determine how they want to address these issues," says Mr. Carrera. "We make suggestions, and then the board can decide if they want to bring somebody in to correct those areas of deficiency or whether they want take them on themselves."
Pinnacle III performed four facility audits in 2011, and has plans to conduct even more in 2012, Mr. Carrera relays.
"We're seeing an increased interest in this service because the economy has tilted a little bit, the competition has increased and people are trying to figure out how they can improve their business," he says. "This is one of the best products we offer. We're making ourselves more available for it because we believe facilities deserve to thrive rather than merely survive."
Not every facility audit identifies areas in need of significant improvement. Pinnacle III has visited facilities that believed they were operating well and the facility audits confirmed that belief.
"We've come out of some facilities and said 'this place is great, we wouldn't necessarily change anything about the majority of your operations,'" says Mr. Carrera. "It's not always about going in and finding things that need to be fixed or altered on a dramatic level. Some ASCs just want confirmation from an outside party that their policies, procedures and processes are up to par, they are effectively monitoring the areas they should be and that they're running well. An outside perspective can prove to be invaluable to your staff, the facility's leadership and its investors."
Learn more about Pinnacle III.
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