Physician recruitment in general is getting tougher and requiring more creativity, according to the recent according to the 2007 Retention Survey from the American Medical Group Association and Cejka Search, which conducted the survey of 43 physician groups representing 14,705 physicians.

What are you doing to recruit and retain physicians for practicing at your ASC? What is your best advice for recruiting physicians to buy into your ASC?

E-mail your thoughts to this question to Rob Kurtz at rob@beckersasc.com. Be sure to include your name, title and business name. Shortly, we will publish a selection of the responses we receive and choose one response as our "featured answer."

This AAAHC Institute study gathered data from 31 organizations performing more than 17,800 procedures a year participated. Among the findings:

· Forty-five percent of procedures were performed due to traumatic injury and 55 percent due to degenerative disease.

· Average discharge time ranged from about 94 minutes for patients receiving epidural/spinal anesthesia to 66 minutes with local anesthesia and IV sedation.

· Ninety-five percent of patients indicated they had begun walking within seven days of the procedure.

For more information about the AAAHC Institute, go here.

1. What do you see as the top safety challenges facing ASCs today?

Michael Kulczycki: First, infection prevention, despite the fact that ASCs, historically, have had a very low infection rate. I think the last -report from the ASC Association's benchmarking has infection rates well under 1 percent. I think occurrences recently in Nevada and New York are raising a lot of visibility on that, and ASCs are going to see, potentially, some increased regulatory pressure about some very specific practices including guidelines around the use of multi-dose medications.

Longer-term, I think you're looking at the use of best practices regarding surgical infections - things like no hair-clipping, antibiotic use before surgery and then suspension of antibiotic medications are also going to get a lot more attention. It's likely CMS will adopt some of those best practices as part of its future requirements for reimbursement. A recent preliminary study showed that more than half of the organizations were already doing it but the industry will have to come a lot farther, a lot faster.

Also, the case in Florida just reminds people of the need to stay on top of malignant hyperthermia. The Malignant Hyperthermia Association of the United States is rich in resources about basic reminders of what you need to have on hand and just a reminder that this can affect everybody.

Read the rest of the story here.

For a limited time, subscribers have the opportunity to attend an audio conference free of charge: "Ambulatory Surgery Center Transactions: Successful Strategies for Mergers, Acquisitions, Divestitures and Restructuring." This offer is limited to 60 attendees. For more information on the audio conference, go here.

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