Atlas Healthcare Partners’ oldest health system relationship is also its clearest proof point. In the Banner Health market, Atlas grew from eight ASCs to 32, a fourfold increase, over roughly eight years.
“For our Banner market, we started with eight centers, and now we have 32 centers,” Atlas CEO Aric Burke told Becker’s. “So a lot of growth. It took eight years to do that.”
The Banner relationship dates to 2018, when the two organizations opened with eight ASCs across Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. Banner, as Atlas’s founding health system relationship, became the template Atlas has since repeated with Prisma Health, Fairview Health Services, MultiCare, Corewell Health and ChristianaCare.
The 32 centers in the Banner market aren’t built to one model. Some are single-specialty — Banner Surgery Center-Desert Vista focuses on pain management and spine care, and Banner Cardiovascular Center-Tanque Verde is built around peripheral arterial disease treatment and cardiac electrophysiology. Others are multispecialty, like the Banner Surgery Center-Chandler, which handles urology, gastroenterology, general surgery, orthopedics and podiatry under one roof.
The path to 32 centers wasn’t a single playbook, either. Some were de novo builds, others came through acquisition. Banner and Atlas acquired two existing Arizona ASCs in 2021, and at least one center, Tanque Verde, started as an office-based lab before converting to a licensed ASC. Atlas has used acquisition, de novo development and conversion to build out the network.
Mr. Burke said that even he underestimated how fast this would move. How fast Atlas grew was the biggest surprise over the last eight years, he told Becker’s.
“There was more demand than I expected, faster than we thought,” he said.
He attributed that pace to timing, the broader market and industry conditions converging on ASCs at once, rather than something specific Atlas did differently.
The scale of that outperformance is worth noting. According to VMG Health, the largest ASC operators nationally grew their combined center counts at a compound annual rate of roughly 4% between 2011 and 2024. Banner’s growth under Atlas, from eight centers to 32 in eight years, works out to a compound annual growth rate of nearly 19%.
Atlas’s newer joint ventures, including the Prisma Health partnership announced in February and the Fairview Health Services partnership announced in April, follow a similar pattern, Mr. Burke said. Atlas forms the joint venture first, builds a market strategy and then grows through a mix of acquisition, conversion and de novo development.
Atlas has put a number on one of those newer markets already. The Prisma Health joint venture targets more than 15 ASCs across the Greenville-Spartanburg, Columbia and Charleston areas, South Carolina’s coastal region and southeastern Tennessee, starting with two existing Prisma ASCs and two new ones transitioning into the partnership.
Company-wide, Atlas now operates 49 ASCs across seven states, performing more than 117,000 annual cases and generating $407 million in annual ASC revenue, a scale Mr. Burke said the company only recently reached.
“We’ve finally reached scale,” he said. “It’s difficult to build up the infrastructure to support a national management company.”
At the Becker’s 32nd Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, taking place October 29-31 in Chicago, ASC leaders, surgeons and healthcare executives will explore strategies to drive growth, enhance operational performance, navigate reimbursement challenges and prepare for the future of ambulatory surgery. Apply for complimentary registration now.
