CommonSpirit Senior Executive Vice President and CFO Michael Browning said the Chicago-based system needs to diversify its portfolio operationally and on the investment side and sees ASCs as a “good expansion opportunity.”
With $40 billion in annual revenue, CommonSpirit has many opportunities in the markets it serves, as well as outside markets, Mr. Browning said on the system’s March 3 investor call.
“So we look at all options, how we grow organically versus how we can grow through acquisitions,” he said. “We have a lot of great partners in the ASC environment. I believe we have 40-plus today in joint ventures and we’ll continue to grow that book of business.”
The pursuit of ASCs is not about size, said Lisa Zuckerman, CommonSpirit’s senior vice president of treasury and strategic investing.
“I think you could argue that we’re pretty big already,” Ms. Zuckerman said. “So it’s not really about getting bigger as much as service line diversification, risk mitigation around headwinds in acute care. More to the point, it’s really where healthcare is going.”
Ms. Zuckerman said healthcare is continuing to move to the outpatient setting and inpatient care is a “very costly chassis.”
“There will always be a need for it because not everything can be done outpatient,” she said. “But more and more is being performed outside the hospital. We see more procedures moving that way. So we need to have both. But if you look at our mix right now, it’s a little too heavily skewed in inpatient relative to ambulatory, so it’s not about size really as much as appropriate mix.”
