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Hello. This is Francesca Matthews with the Becker's
ASC review podcast.
I'm thrilled to be joined today by Kathleen
Hickman, administrator and clinical director of the Dutchess
Ambulatory Surgical Center. Thank you so much for
being here today. Well, thank you for having
me. It's my pleasure.
Yeah. Of course.
To start us off, could you please introduce
yourself and tell us a little bit about
your background?
Yes. Of course. So I am Kathy Hickman.
I go by Kathy. Kathleen is my formal
name. But,
yes, I'm I'm part of the ASC industry,
and and proudly, I have been working at
my center for twenty five years this year.
I do serve as the administrator. I do
now have a clinical director, so I don't
have to use that role as much. But,
my background is nursing, so I am a
nurse by trade. And I also work part
time as a nurse with my company because
I think it's important to be part of
that. So I am my I have a
master's in health care administration as well as
my bachelor's in nursing, and I am CASC
certified.
And I just love the ASC industry.
K. Excellent. And we'll just jump into some
questions here.
To start off kind of broadly, what are
the top three trends that you're following in
health care and ASCs today?
Well, there are so many trends. I guess
if I had to think about what I'm
most interested in or thinking about is, one,
consolidation,
number two, AI, and number three, moving higher
acuity cases to our settings. Those are my
three top trends I'm following.
Mhmm.
And what are you most excited about right
now?
Well, back to the question two, I guess
I am excited about all of those trends
because,
with consolidation, we are seeing a lot more
and more AOCs consolidating. A lot of pros
and cons with that. We certainly would have
better buying power, better economies of scale, and,
maybe better market clout. Again, it could also
decrease competition and a little bit of loss
of autonomy, but that's okay. I think that
there's enough out there for all of us
to share.
I am very excited about the increased, move
for acuity higher acuity cases to our ASCs.
I think in New York itself, cardiology has
not been,
so that has not been approved, but now
we're getting towards a closer approval process for
adding cardiology to our our AOCs and moving
it out of the hospital settings, as well
as total joints. That is, more prominent, but
it's becoming, more and more in many or
many of the ASCs.
Mhmm. That definitely,
echoes just things I'm hearing over here on
the ASC side of things.
Just a little follow-up there.
I know total joints and cardiology are both,
you know, specialties or areas that I know
a lot of people are looking at as
far as expanding service lines. I'm I'm wondering,
you know, since we're still in, like, the
very,
like you said, early stages of that,
Kind of how are you thinking about that
right now? What are
in these early stages, what can one do
to sort of,
you know, begin begin to evaluate that and
prepare for potentially expansion of those service lines
as they become more widely approved?
Well, I think, creating this space in your
ASC, and if you're a new build, you
can also plan ahead to have that availability
in terms of the the space to do
some of these. Total joints do require a
lot of a lot of room.
So we actually just built our ASC,
two years ago. We were in a prior
location for over twenty years, and we we
built with the future in our in mind.
So we know that we can add total
joints at any time. We have a twenty
three hour stateroom as well. I think maybe
ASCs just need to be prepared.
I think we have to know how to
recruit. We need to know what our market
is around us
to see who these providers are. Are there
surgeons in the area that are are able
to move into the setting of an ASC?
So I think it's knowing your your players,
your market,
the the, the learning curve for your staff.
You know, get those people prepared ahead of
time. Talk about doing some of those minor
ASC cardiac procedures if it's gonna come to
fruition. Let them know ahead of time how
we're gonna do this,
understand the technology,
look at the cost for adding that and
what what is the reimbursement, make sure that
we're prepared to understand how much it will
cost us to bring these cases in, you
know, what's the return on investment. I think
all of those things are things I would
I would say people should be prepared for
moving their service lines into their center.
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that, again, just those
are questions that I think a lot of
leaders are sort of considering right now.
Kind of still digging into this,
you know, this topic of expansion,
How are you thinking about growth over the
next twelve months?
Well, I'm thinking about growth in terms of,
CMS finally looking at more,
codes that can be done in our ASC
setting. So that's really exciting to us because
we know that they've approved over two
seventy six codes for 2026.
So we know that with that, there'll be
several codes that we can grow our center.
So we think that's gonna be one of
our areas of growth. And we're looking a
lot toward culture as well. Culture is something
that I think isn't looked at enough, but
culture
enables
innovation.
Innovation promotes growth.
So the more innovative you can become with
these newer codes and these expanded codes, I
think we have more staff engagement.
We have leadership development, and I think that
would be a very big area for us
to look over look at in the next
twelve months is the CMS approval list to
see what we can do to add to
our center and then how to really enhance
our grow our culture to enable innovation and
then grow even bigger.
Absolutely.
Is there anything else that I haven't touched
on today that you think is really important
in this conversation?
Let's see. We talked about consolidation. I think
AI I think we're all looking at AI.
AI is very important. I think we can
really use AI to our benefit.
It'll help probably create efficiencies for us. We
have a never ending staffing challenge.
It may be able to take over a
space that we could not fill. Maybe we
can engage AI to help us do some
of the work that otherwise a person has
done. Again, not to move our physical employees
out. I think that's a huge important part
of our workplace is that human touch. We
answer our phones. I think everyone should look
at that. Do we do we go to
our are our phones answered, or are they
going into a a tree when you're the
twelfth caller? I think that definitely is a
negative,
feedback to our patients. But,
again, AI is something that I think we
should probably at least start dabbling in, looking
at to see what we can do to
help make changes for ASC.
Absolutely. Well, that is all I have for
you today, Kathy. Thank you so much for
joining us. Well, thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure. It's always wonderful. Becker's
is a great, great format, and we really
enjoy them.
Well, thank you so much. Well, yeah, it's
been a pleasure speaking with you too, and
I look forward to connecting with you again
in the future. Great. Thank you. Same as
you, Francesca. I appreciate your time today.