Numerous hospitals and health systems have begun investing more heavily in ambulatory care as technological advancements and payer policies continue to fuel the migration of procedures to the outpatient setting.
Samuel Bauer, MD, a maternal fetal medicine specialist and chief medical officer of Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., told Becker’s that outpatient care will play a critical role in preparing for anticipated increases in patient volumes in the coming years while also improving patient experience.
“All of our length-of-stay initiatives are making sure that patients are getting the quality care that they need when they’re in the hospital,” he said. “And if there are certain things that they don’t need [to be done] in the hospital anymore, that can be done in the outpatient setting, that can be more nimble … lots of initiatives around length of stay helps not only with cost, but it certainly helps with quality for our patients.”
While there continues to be significant industry buzz around the rise of ambulatory care — especially given CMS’ recent addition of more than 500 procedures to the ASC Covered Procedures List — Dr. Bauer said that the challenge of hospital leadership is to strike the careful balance between inpatient and outpatient surgical volumes.
“It’s a yin and yang for sure. William Beaumont University Hospital is a very large surgical hospital, so you want to be doing lots of surgery in the hospital,” he said. “But we’re moving a lot of this work that was traditionally all done in the hospital to the outpatient [setting], ASCs and other areas. There’s additional capacity, but you need the revenue so that you can continue to get another robot or to add another line of subspecialty surgery.”
As CMO, Dr. Bauer is honed in on safety and “level-setting” across the organization with regards to what should and shouldn’t be performed in ASCs.
“We’ve got such a long runway of folks that want to get surgeries done,” he said. “It’s really the role of the CMO to help the hospital help themselves and [determine] what is appropriate to be done here versus what can be done in the ASC.”
