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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 Gabriel Figueroa, who is
an administrator and the COO of Manhattan Reproductive
Surgery Center. Gabriel, thanks for joining me today.
Would love to have you start off by
introducing yourself a little bit further and expanding
on your work in the industry.
First, thanks for having me. We, Manhattan Reproductive
Surgery Center, is single specialty surgery center located
in downtown
Manhattan, and we're
the only surgery center in the entire state
that focuses purely on women's health and fertility.
So it's almost a hyper specialty of GYN
where we've everything that we do is optimizing
our patients for pregnancy.
Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here. And
let's start our conversation
with ASC volume. So countrywide, this is expected
to increase by 16%
by the year 2032.
With this growth, what is the most pressing
challenge to maintaining a positive patient experience that
you are finding?
Well, I think there's a lot of challenges,
obviously, when you start talking about increases in
volume, whether that be dramatic or incremental.
But I think I'd like to focus on
probably where things start, and that's your scheduling
and
booking departments.
That's kind of that's the inception of the
case,
and everything
sort of starts there. So you need to
make sure
that you have a robust infrastructure in place,
the workflows and processes in order to absorb
whatever
expected
increases in volume that you're gonna have. This
has residual impacts throughout the continuum of the
entire operations of the ASC.
So I I really believe that taking it
from sort of the very
beginning start of the process is something that
is
critical.
It has residual effects, like I said, to
insurance verification,
your PAT process,
etcetera.
Absolutely. And and going along with that, what
strategies have worked for your organization in tackling
these challenges?
And what's one recommendation you have for health
care leaders to stay ahead of them?
Well, I think you have to take a
strategic
perspective here when you're looking at different solutions
and tactics in order to implement some of
these challenges.
The first one I would say is
really invest and integrate into a strong EMR.
Most of the the new EMRs on the
market now come with tools
that going that are going to expand your
bandwidth in terms of
front office
operations.
For example,
we've implemented Sys Complete,
and that gives us the ability to use
tools like Syslink, which allows the physicians to
book directly into the schedule from their offices.
It also has the ability to send
readmission testing questionnaires to the patients and having
them fill that out via
a text or email. That's increased our efficiency.
Automated insurance verification is another thing where you
wanna make sure that you're getting that insurance
verification
done as quickly as possible so that you
can communicate back to the patient what kind
of out of pocket financial responsibilities
there might be. This has a really big
impact on their satisfaction.
Examples
like confirmation calls and the PAT process can
be cumbersome, particularly when you're experiencing
big upticks in volume.
The staff becomes stressed.
Their customer service may wane.
Patients might start to get anxious
or uncertain about when their procedures
is going to actually happen because they haven't
received a phone call. So I believe
tackling it from this perspective,
we've really implemented a lot of this stuff
to mitigate
any decreases in patient satisfaction by implementing all
these things.
And shifting gears just a little bit to
the financial side, how can leaders ensure their
staff are well equipped to help patients navigate
financial aspects of care? And how does this
benefit patient provider relationships?
Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. I
think first and foremost, you have to have
an established
set of financial guidelines that are set, understood,
and followed. And and that has to go
not just with your your
front office staff, but that has to be
acknowledged and accepted by the physicians as well.
How quickly insurance verification is done, like I
was mentioning before, after a case is scheduled,
is key to being able to communicate any
issues or problems back to the physician's office
and patients.
Right? Patient never wants to show up on
the date of service and get a surprise
invoice. Right? Nobody called me and told me
that I was gonna have this out of
pocket. So the sooner you can get ahead
of that,
the better for everyone.
You know, if there's an issue where a
patient has a financial hardship
or is
unable to proceed forward with the surgery, you
wanna make sure you're communicating that to the
surgeon's office as soon as possible to mitigating
any last minute cancellations,
move up cases, etcetera.
So every effort really has to be made
prior to the data service to be as
transparent and communicated as possible with patients in
regards to financial responsibility.
You never wanna put your clinical staff
in a situation where they're having to either
explain financial responsibility
because they're not equipped with that knowledge or
information, typically.
And it also delays surgical flaw.
And as we wrap up here, do you
have any parting words you'd like to share
on the podcast today?
No. I'm just excited to be here. Thank
you so much for inviting me, and, look
forward to doing it again. Wonderful. Well, thank
you so much. Again, we are live at
the business and operations of ASCs.
Thank you.