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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are recording live at the
twenty second annual Spine Orthopedic and Pain Management
Conference. I'm currently joined by Sean Gibson, who
is the CEO at Remedy Surgery Centers. Thanks
for being here. We'd love to start off
by having you share a little bit more
about yourself, your role, and your organization.
Thank you. Thank you for for having me
here.
I've been in, medicine now for about thirty
seven years.
The ASC market itself, it's been about thirty
two of those thirty seven years.
I think the unique side of what,
I'd have to offer out there now is
I've been on the corporate side,
I've been on the publicly traded side, and
I'm on the private side now. So
it's given me a kind of a look
from the perspective of what
AACs, how those threats are for them.
It gives me the other side from the
private side looking back at the hospital.
How can I
friendly cohabitate an area and share patients,
without
letting them into my
wallet per se, and keeping our investors
happy as well? So
I've been in medicine all my life.
I've grown some of the businesses just on
my own as as a business owner,
and then just the the partnerships
and the publicly traded side of the world.
Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here. And
let's start our conversation with what trends or
shifts you're currently seeing right now in the
industry that you think are most important for
industry leaders to pay attention to.
I I'm gonna state the obvious. One of
them is the the payer market. Right? So
our payer market
is changing at lightning speed, and it's it's
amazing
really to kinda sit back and watch. There's
there's days where I'm
planning for, you know, negotiations for up and
coming commercial
markets. But on the other side, I'm talking
to large companies, and those large companies,
quite honestly, they're fed up. They're tired,
of the double digit.
One
example that I had from just last week,
this large company, they have 1,100 employees, and
they're facing a 29%
increase from their their payer.
So they're not gonna do it. They're gonna
they're gonna do their own. And so
we've created our own consortium,
and
to be quite honest, it
it takes the middleman out. So we are
seeing patients quicker.
We get paid quicker.
We don't have to do authorizations.
It it's it's really a
a savvy market to get into, but you,
you know, you need to get in now.
And oddly enough, as soon as we got
into the first one, I was approached by
three more.
So that payer market, yes, we'll still contend
on the outside with, you know, the commercial
market and the federal payers.
But some of the new stuff, you know,
private pay versus,
a bundled type scenario. You just need to
make sure that you're you're building
that
repertoire of of payers out, and,
you can you can plan off of that
a lot easier. So
Absolutely.
In staffing and workforce challenges, those continue to
be a concern across health care. So how
is your organization navigating these pressures, and what
strategies have you seen work well?
In that scenario,
you really have to look at a a
couple different things. And to be quite honest,
you have to step off your soapbox that
you're used to being on as a hospital
administrator.
It was easy. We had a department, we
just went there,
and we we picked up our folks. But
I can't I can't do that, you know,
in in an ASC. I mean, we can,
but it would the reach is
nothing compared to what we're
we've had in the past. So
I've actually done some different things. I've gone
to the local colleges that, have nursing schools
or whatever,
scrub
programs,
and we have
partnered with them in the sense that we're
allowing their students to come do
walk throughs or or they can do, you
know, some skills training in a real live
OR and kinda watch some stuff happen there.
In return for doing that, we get
to fish their their pool first. So I
can pick up the top three graduates and
take them in.
It's hard. I mean, there's a there's a
negative to that because those folks have not
been in a real life
environment, but you can mold them. And if
you
have senior enough folks, you can mold them
to be that person that your surgeons
absolutely want to be on the case.
And as outpatient care continues to grow, how
do you see the role of orthopedics and
ASCs evolving within the broader healthcare ecosystem? So
that's an easy one.
Looking around at the
the conference
now,
it's full of orthopedic folks. It is full
of spine folks. I mean,
orthopedics,
things are, you know, they're
it's getting easier to do these higher
complex,
higher acuity cases in an ASC. It's
we've spent the time and pulled the data,
and now people are seeing, you know, it
it's not really as scary as what they
initially painted it to be. So
doing those big complex cases,
it's just given us a
a bigger market to to
play in, and we're attracting those bigger surgeons
that now
aren't so against doing surgeries
in our center versus the hospital.
And then as we round out our conversation,
many organizations are exploring new technologies,
partnerships, or care models to improve efficiency and
outcomes. So are there any innovations or initiatives
you found particularly promising?
Probably just like everybody else. I mean, that
there every other word out of anybody's mouth
here at this conference is AI, and,
we've just gotta face the facts. It's here.
So
I'm a little bit of an older guy,
but,
I think the biggest thing for me
going into this is I don't really understand
what it is.
I don't really understand how it works,
and I don't know how much it costs.
So
it's an exact reason to come to conferences
like this. So
I've been in
many, many AI
talks here,
have learned a ton,
have made some connections, and,
AI now is, you know, something you can
look at. It's it's gonna be in every
piece of an operations
perspective,
but most importantly on a payer side. When
we're looking at our
our data for billing,
I can use AI to scrub through that
stuff and just reduce
many human errors. I it
I'm starting to sound like, you know, some
of the the robotic stuff, but, I mean,
it it truly is. And it's not that
I'm gonna get rid of my billing staff.
Those folks are going to manage
the AI within that,
and
allow us to grow.
I don't have to have as many FTEs.
Really, that AI
bot
is a an electronic FTE per se that
that's working twenty four hours a day that
when they come back in, my
director comes back in. She can look back
through the scrub data,
make any corrections that we might need to
do, and
know that we're throwing you know, we're putting
a clean claim in, and it's gonna be
paid.
Well, Sean, thank you for taking the time
to be here today. Is there anything else
you'd like to share that we didn't get
to touch on?
I think we've covered a, a lot.
Honestly, I would say to anybody to use
these conferences
intelligently and and look
it gives us a a peek into the
future,
and what that market is really doing before
it really actually gets here. And you get
to see some of the widgets and play
with them, pick them up, and
it's it's a conference. It's it's what these
are here for. So
spend the money, come out, and there's great
people. It's a great networking opportunity. I've met
many new folks here, and then participate.
Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for joining us
today on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. Again, we
are live at the twenty second annual Spine
Orthopedic and Pain Management Conference.
Thank you so much.