Independent physicians are increasingly expanding into ASCs, but many still lack the scale and infrastructure to capture the same savings and operational efficiencies available to larger platforms.
That gap, particularly in areas such as supply and implant spending, employee benefits and capital procurement, helped drive physician-owned Pelto Health Partners to launch its ASC platform initiative, according to fractional CEO Rachel Uzlik.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and length.
Question: Can you discuss the independent focus of the initiative and why perhaps that’s important with ASCs in particular?
Rachel: If we pull all the way back and say, how does healthcare survive and thrive for patient care? Competition is good, right? That’s what drives better outcomes for patients. When you have consolidation, you lose healthy competition to produce better outcomes.
And so we firmly believe that the hospital system has to succeed, or the hospital-employed model has to succeed, but equally so — and maybe more so, in our opinion — the independents have to survive. It allows for the power of choice, or the power of autonomy, to really thrive in the independent space.
And Pelto could go to market and say all of our ASC offerings are now accessible for all of the healthcare industry, but our critical focus, since we are founded and supported and owned by independent physicians, is to ensure that the independents have the same capabilities and access to scale that the hospital systems do without losing their power of choice and autonomy, their identity, how they focus locally on patient care.
Pelto wraps around those practices to give them that influence and strength that the hospital systems have because their scale is so large. We do it in a way that allows them to remain their independence. They are supported by Pelto the way a hospital system would support some of their local markets, without taking over their ownership, without changing their tax IDs, without forcing them to make clinical decisions or even operational decisions. Quite frankly, we just give them the power of scale and expertise. We can accelerate their programming because we are run and owned by independent practices. We can translate that how-to-do-things-faster as independent physicians through our network.
