ASCs have become a focal point of hospital and health systems’ investment interests as payer incentives, patient preferences and rising operational costs necessitate a shift to outpatient settings.
Despite the significant advancements many health systems have already made in ambulatory care, many still have work to do to fully align inpatient and outpatient workflows.
Walter Allen Fink, DO, chief medical officer of UT Health San Antonio, recently joined Becker’s to discuss where he thinks health systems still have some catching up to do in the race to outpatient.
Editor’s note: This response has been lightly edited for clarity and length:
Question: Where are you still seeing gaps in the optimization of outpatient care among healthcare organizations?
Dr. Fink: I think we have to figure out how to create a more robust hospital-at-home kind of scenario where there’s home healthcare that’s available to provide services that don’t demand a hospital setting, but are still kind of hospital-level services. There’s a lot of home health that goes on, but there’s a lot of gaps in making sure that we’re doing that correctly and working that system to be optimal. And then it’s got to be paid for, frankly.
We have to be reimbursed for it, because it’s not inexpensive. It requires a lot of resources to do that. And the resources are different from hospital resources, but they’re still present. I’ve always said that, if you want to change the way we do healthcare, change the way we pay for it, and we’ll respond to it in that way. If that’s where we should go strategically, I think that our payers need to get on board strategically with that as well. In the end, it will be low cost, and I think the outcomes will be at least as good, or better, than what we get here in the hospital.
