Health systems have been leaning into ASC development in recent years as patient preferences, value-based incentives and operational costs make the outpatient shift a central aspect of growth strategies.
Walter Allen Fink, DO, chief medical officer of UT Health San Antonio, recently joined Becker’s to discuss the challenges his health system has faced as it ramps up their ASC operations.
Editor’s note: This response has been lightly edited for clarity and length:
Question: What are you feeling excited about as it relates to outpatient growth?
Dr. Fink: We’re doing a lot of complex [gastrointestinal] work, advanced endoscopy work, a lot of which is outpatient. There’s some that still ends up staying in the hospital, but there’s a fair amount of stuff that used to be a surgery that comes in the hospital that now is getting done via endoscopy, which is incredible. It’s really incredible. I think that’s a big area of growth for us that we’re going to be leaning into. And I think it will provide a lot of benefit to our patients.
We opened our first real ASC about a year and a half ago, and there are a lot of challenges in opening an ASC, even beyond just getting accredited, which was half the hurdle. But really it’s getting payer contracts in line. And the payers don’t have a ton of incentive to contract with every ASC because they already have a number of ASCs, and so it was a really big hurdle. It was a lot of work to get that done, and it took much longer than what we thought it would. But I think now that it’s done and complete, the ASC is really taking off and doing well, and it’s very busy, and I think for us that’s another area of opportunity to continue to grow.
