Technological advances in healthcare can help make outpatient surgery and procedures feasible, but they can also come with high sticker prices for centers working with small margins.
Three experts shared their approaches to getting these tools at Becker’s 31st Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity.
Question: What are some strategies that you found most effective for getting surgeons and staff on board with some new tools? What works, what doesn’t? Does generational difference among employees play a role in this adoption?
Thomas Hutchinson. Administrator at Surgery Center of Central Florida (Ocala): In our ASC we try to let clinical technology be highly driven by the physician. If there’s an interest with the physician, then we’ll work to try to get it and figure it out. If there’s no interest by the physician, then we kind of let it roll … When our physicians have a resident or a fellow, they do come to the ASC, and they do see some of the stuff. There are a couple technologies that we have that the hospital doesn’t have right now, and the way we’ve been able to get them is we work with the vendors. It might not be the manufacturer, it might be the selling vendor that we buy other products from. Maybe they can’t budge on that product, so we ask them “Will you give us a discount on another product?” That kind of evens it out …. The goal is to keep the cost per case at a minimum and keep the margin higher. Even if it’s on dropping it on a different product that we know we’re going to use in that same case, it’s achieving the same goal. That doesn’t always work out, but that has worked out on some of the technology we’d like to use.
Mike Curtis, MD. Twin River Ambulatory Surgery Center (White River Junction, Vt.): Urologists have a long history of using technology kind of beyond our local institution’s capacity to purchase and support that technology. There aren’t a lot of hospitals or ASCs that own a shock wave machine [to break up kidney stones]. It usually comes around on a van or with a service. It feels to me that there’s been a move away from that and the business models of the manufacturers are they want to make more capital sales. I get that. But particularly in areas like ours, there are rural areas where the small hospitals just can’t afford the large capital outlay despite the marketing spreadsheet that says that they’ll make this much on it. I think if we can encourage the providers of these people making these amazing machines to consider selling to a company that would then allow that technology to travel around, frankly, in the long term, the companies are going to make more money because their services will be more widely utilized. But then that’s a way to get high end technology without a capital, huge capital expense by an individual institution.
Ying Chen, DO. OrthoNeuro (Columbus, Ohio): One of the things I was going to mention is augmented reality and goggles that you can wear, and they show you the navigation data. There are some companies out there that provide these technologies as a service type model. You can pay a monthly fee, and then you get all the software updates. If they have new versions of their hardware, you get an update on that. From a business side, I don’t know what’s better.
