Peter Bravos, MD, chief medical officer of Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Surgery Center Division, joined Becker’s to discuss how integrating ASCs with primary care, post-acute services and surgeon partners is key to success.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and length.
Question: What are the biggest hurdles to value-based care integration today, and how is Sutter positioning its ASCs to succeed?
Dr. Peter Bravos: To function well in that kind of landscape with population health, you need interoperability and alignment across a system. That’s what Sutter has put together: we function as a team across clinics and primary care, the ASCs, post-operative care, PT, home health, and hospice — everything together. That’s an important piece.
Then, making sure outcomes are measured and that we’re watching costs so we can see how it all plays out. What Sutter has begun to look at is: how do we create that value across our continuum? While I’d say we’re in our infancy, some of the bundled-payment models and shared-savings structures that align incentives between ASCs, surgeons and payers will reward that over time.
Sutter has joint-venture ASCs, which should play that out, because the surgeons and proceduralists who are owners are also fully vested in creating that scenario for their patients.
ASCs are going to become more important as we move on. Technology is allowing us to do a lot of cases we couldn’t do in the past. When I started my career, a total knee stayed in the hospital for several days; now patients go home four hours after the procedure.
As we do more of those, we need coordinated post-op care — home health and hospice where appropriate, coordinated physical therapy — all the elements to give a rounded package of care that patients should have.
