United Surgical Partners International, including its parent company, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare; Surgery Partners; and Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare are three of the largest ASC chains in the U.S.
Here are six insights from their CEOs on their strategies for 2022 and beyond, pulled from their fourth-quarter earnings calls:
Sam Sutaria, MD. CEO of Tenet Healthcare: We've deployed over $2.5 billion in capital investment at USPI since December of 2020, scaling USPI to be the leading ambulatory surgery platform. We also welcomed over 3,400 physicians to USPI's medical staff and started approximately 90 new high-acuity service lines. We anticipate strong returns from the high-caliber investments we've made.
Brett Brodnax. President and CEO of USPI: We have continued to experience significant growth in our total joint business. … Obviously, SurgCenter Development does a great job, and has historically done a great job in expanding their total joint footprint. [With our new partnership], we're going to continue to learn from them and vice versa in terms of how we expand not only in total joints, but also across a wide variety of higher-acuity specialties, including spine, including cardiac. So we'll continue to learn from one another as we integrate their business into ours. And obviously, with our five-year partnership with SurgCenter, we will continue to work together as they build out their portfolio and partner together on a go-forward basis with essentially everything they do from a development perspective over the next five years.
Eric Evans. CEO of Surgery Partners: We certainly anticipated some of an increase [in labor cost], but where we projected it and where it showed up were in those regions that were affected more significantly by the omicron variant, most notably in our California facilities. Based on our comprehensive review, we believe these pressures are localized, not widespread, and largely temporary responses to supply and demand pressures. We have considered some of the regional labor rate pressures in our plans for 2022. Rest assured that we constantly monitor and closely manage these costs. When we saw this trend begin to emerge in early 2021, we developed more robust and detailed intelligence reporting that enhanced our operators' and executives' ability to proactively manage labor efficiency, premium labor statistics and other key metrics with the objective of rapidly identifying hot spots, as well as best practices
Eric Evans: We continue to see our physician pipeline strengthen. This is not something that's slowing down. Our pipeline is as strong entering this year as it's ever been, actually, I'd say, stronger than it's ever been. So we look at the opportunities that remain on that as a big part of our organic growth. When we go out and acquire a new facility, one of the big value propositions we bring is being really thoughtful around how we market to and gain traction with the most important physicians in that community that can drive value in our facilities. We've executed upon that really well, and I don't expect that to change.
Sam Hazen. CEO of HCA Healthcare: Our non-COVID acuity levels for the year have been up compared to 2019. And so we have seen a natural lift in acuity. Part of that is strategic, part of that is some migration into outpatient, and part of that is the environment that we're in. So we anticipate that acuity levels will remain strong. I don't know that we've assigned a metric to it at this particular point in time, but if you look at our non-COVID activity for the year as a whole, it is up compared to 2019.
Sam Hazen: We have a strong pipeline of projects that will come online in 2022 and 2023 that are connected to both our hospital platform as well as our outpatient platform. So we see, again, the model of HCA continuing to produce solid results and deliver value to our patients and value to our shareholders.