Buddy Bacon, CEO of Meridian Surgical Partners, discusses how to effectively manage operations for multiple ASCs, recruit quality team members and make your centers attractive places to work.
Q: How would you sum up your management approach?
Buddy Bacon: I think the word that would sum up my management philosophy is accountability. We take the approach here at Meridian that we have regional operators who are responsible for three or four facilities, so they can really focus and have income statement responsibility for each of their centers. They’re responsible for everything, even though we will support them from a corporate perspective with managed care, accounting and finance and physician recruitment.
In management, if three or four people are responsible for [one task], you can have a lot of finger pointing when you ask a question. If you have one individual who’s ultimately responsible for the performance of a center, they are empowered to make decisions.
Q: What qualities do you look for in your regional operators?
BB: We’re looking for somebody with well-rounded experience. There are generally two types of individuals who fit this experience. Some come from the business office side and understand the financial aspect of ASCs and have, over the course of their career, had the experience to understand the clinical aspects too. The other type of individual is clinical but has also acquired experience about the business side. Both have different strengths, and they compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Q: What qualities do you look for in your physician partners?
BB: I think the physician that sees the benefit of outpatient surgery is really the type of individual you want to select as a partner. You want the physician who looks at ownership as more than being an owner, who is interested in financial performance and day-to-day operations and is just as enthusiastic about that business as you are. Looking at our physician groups, all our physicians are very plugged into the business.
When we have a board meeting at a particular facility, we invite all our physician partners because it’s important that they take part in understanding and cultivating the morale and culture of the employees.
Q: What are your priorities following health reform?
BB: I think we’re all trying to figure out how the economic downturn has impacted our volumes as an industry. We have an extra sense of urgency about how those changes relate to recruiting new physician partners into our centers. It’s prudent for us as operators in this sector to communicate with the public about the benefits of an ASC, and we’re starting to do a much better job of that. As the demographics of the population change, if someone can have their surgical procedure performed in an ASC setting in the morning and be back home by lunchtime, that’s a lot better than having to spend all day in a hospital. It’s just basically educating the public on the efficiencies and the effectiveness of ASCs.
Q: How do you cut costs in your ASCs on a day-to-day basis?
BB: We manage our company and our centers with the attitude that we’re going to look at saving money every day. So we are always making sure we have the centers staffed appropriately, we get a better cost on our supplies and we monitor general and administrative expenses. We’re always looking for better ways to do things. That’s a common push every month: What ways can we be more efficient? If you focus on that every month, you can improve efficiency in ASCs that are already efficient. You can focus on managing different areas, such as supplies, without impacting patient care.
Q: How do you maintain high quality of care while cutting costs?
BB: We will do nothing that conflicts with providing high quality of care and quality is just a standard you don’t jeopardize. They’re good centers, and we’re not in a [financial] position where we have to cut costs just to keep the doors open for business. We’re looking at reducing our expenses so we can increase cash flow so we can continue to reinvest in the business.
Q: What kind of competition do you face, and how do you handle it?
BB: If you buy the right center and you partner with physicians who have thriving practices, you’re really not competing with an ASC down the street. Your competition comes when you’re going out and recruiting physicians in the marketplace. In order to handle that, we try to explain the culture and morale of our centers to physicians and how this makes them an enjoyable place to be. They all understand the benefits of an ASC, and 80 percent of [job satisfaction] comes from the culture of your company. It directly impacts a physician’s experience.
Q: How do you make your ASCs great places to work?
BB: We try to provide an environment where employees can make decisions, where they feel like owners in the business. We don’t manage this company with a lot of bureaucracy. If somebody needs a decision made and they have a question, they can usually go to a single person to see what the answer is and move forward.
Q: What is the best piece of advice you’ve received related to ASC management?
BB: Remember that your physicians are your customers, and the patients are the physician’s customers. We try to treat our physicians like they’re our number one customers. As far as management in general, I would say that your company is only as good as your people are. Those are the people impacting your physicians and your patients every day.
Read more about Meridian Surgical Partners.
