Patients are increasingly choosing ASCs as low-cost, high-quality sites of service, and many ASC leaders see physicians playing a role in the migration.
"As more surgeons recognize that ASCs are more efficient and easy places to work, they move their patients to those settings over a hospital-based facility," Scott Thellman, MD, a surgeon at Lawrence (Kan.) Plastic Surgery, told Becker's. "Patients prefer the convenience and lower out-of-pocket costs typically seen at an ASC."
For physicians, ASCs offer more flexibility with efficient use of staff and operating rooms away from the "slow-moving bureaucratic hospital, as they can find more of the things professionally they want to do in a far easier, efficient, streamlined system," Timothy Kremchek, MD, of Cincinnati-based Beacon Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine, told Becker's.
About 66 percent of surgery centers are wholly owned by physicians, according to a June report from Definitive Healthcare, with the rest of the market owned solely or in collaboration with hospitals and corporations.
With physicians increasingly choosing ASCs, patients are listening.
"Patients trust their physicians and the decisions their physicians make on where their surgery should take place, whether it be in a hospital or as an outpatient at an ASC," Laura Galeazzi, administrator of Lancaster, Calif.-based Antelope Valley Surgical Institute, told Becker's.