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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
podcast, and we are live at the business
and operations of ASCs.
I'm currently joined by Tina Petrovski who serves
as the CEO of Copper Ridge Surgery Center.
So, Tina, thank you for joining me today,
and we'd love to have you start off
by introducing yourself and telling us a little
bit more about your role in this space.
Sure. Thank you, Grace. Thank you for the
opportunity to be here today.
Yes, I have been in the ASC industry.
This is my 20th year
and for nearly the past decade, I have
been in an administrative role.
I have been certified as a
administrator in the surgery center with the cast
designation.
I've also served on the Michigan Ambulatory Surgery
Association board. I am currently the past president.
Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here. And
let's start our conversation today talking about ASC
volume. So this is expected to increase all
over the country by 16%
by the year 2032.
With this growth, what are the most pressing
challenges to maintaining a positive patient experience?
Grace, as you know, communication
is
essential in maintaining a positive patient experience. And
as your center is facing growth,
perhaps you're adding new physicians,
new procedures,
new service lines,
good problems to have, but that also does
put a layer of organizational
stress
on your team and on your center.
Perhaps you're going through some physical expansion as
well to accommodate your growth,
and you might have,
to increase your communication
ahead of time for your patients,
including
things on your website, if you're undergoing construction,
the pardon my dust signs that you might
want to strategically place
to keep that communication up. And then also
just making sure that your team and everyone
in the center
is speaking the same message to our staff,
because as they're
wanting to see
the increased growth in bringing new patients and
new service lines to your surgery center,
they also need to have the resources to
effectively still do their job on a day
to day basis.
You also want to make sure that the
patient satisfaction,
you know, stays high so that you're informing
patients of their wait times,
informing family members of their wait times if
there's been delays
and really just focusing on any area of
communication that you can to
positively
impact the patient experience.
And kind of going off of that, what
strategies have worked for your organization to tackle
some of these challenges, and what's one recommendation
you have for health care leaders to stay
ahead?
Yeah. Great question.
One of the things that we did several
years ago is we formed a patient satisfaction
committee.
And
this is where, we have representatives from various
departments, clinical and nonclinical,
and they meet quarterly.
And what we do is we look at
some of our patient satisfaction comments, some other
results,
any,
occurrences that may have happened that,
we had to follow-up on if a patient
had a complaint about something,
and how can we
con continuously
improve and make process improvements
in patient satisfaction. So this has been a
really highly engaged team,
and we've rolled out a lot of different,
initiatives
to constantly improve our patient satisfaction,
including a focus on pediatric patient satisfaction
and how to best improve the patient experience
for our youngest population.
As far as a recommendation for healthcare leaders
to stay ahead, I would say that, you
know, just embrace change.
It's a constant certainly in healthcare and in
our environment.
And, you know, welcome new ideas and feedback
from your teams and use this as an
opportunity to continuously
improve.
Absolutely. And shifting gears just a little bit
toward the financial side. How can leaders ensure
their staff are well equipped to help patients
navigate the financial aspects of their care, and
how does this benefit patient provider relationships?
Great question.
There are so many nuances with payers and
contracts,
and those can vary, you know, from payer
to payer
and really arming your team with all the
information that they need to be able to
help answer questions for their patients
is,
is essential. So we focus on a lot
of, you know, constant staff training.
We are focusing on having one dedicated individual
with a backup
for when this individual is gone to constantly
on a weekly basis be monitoring the updates
on the payer sites.
As we know, payers will make changes to
their policy and their,
provider manual
and they don't notify you and you have
to go out to their web site to
see what their latest changes are and what
procedures are now
requiring a prior auth that weren't requiring before
or any other changes that are happening.
So,
focusing on constant staff training, having a dedicated
individual that can help monitor those communications, ensure
that with the rest that can help monitor
those communications and share that with the rest
of the team.
But yeah, having those conversations with patients on
their financial responsibility
is becoming increasingly
challenging because more and more patients have higher
deductibles
and we've
certainly understood that patients have a hard time
really comprehending exactly what is their responsibility.
There may be some confusion on the patient
side regarding what is the copay, what is
the deductible,
what is their out of pocket mats
And having a well trained staff that can
talk them through that and help them understand
can help them start to build trust in
your facility and in your team
prior to them even stepping foot in your
door.
And as we wrap our conversation today, I'd
love to know if you have any parting
words for the podcast or anything else you'd
like to share. Well, thank you, Grace. I
would say invest in your leadership team, invest
in leadership development.
We are constantly
growing and training the next generation of ASC
leaders.
And, you know, this starts from the time
of hire, communicate to your workforce
and to your new hires that there is
a path for professional
growth in your organization.
Explore things such as internship programs, apprenticeship programs,
hiring summer students that are going to be
applying to nursing programs or medical schools.
And just
reinforcing that an ASC is a great
opportunity to learn
and to be
professionally challenged. There's so much that you can
do, so many committees that you can be
a part of and so much cross training
that can happen that can really help benefit
and grow you professionally and grow your team
professionally.
Wonderful. Well, Tina, thank you so much for
joining me today on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
Again, we're live at the business and operations
of ASCs. Thanks so much. Thank you.