February 14, 2023 – There are several traditional care shift drivers that have been present for years in the Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) space – things like payment incentives across sites, and minimally invasive surgical techniques that permit surgeries to occur on an outpatient basis.
But there are also new drivers impacting the shift of care from the acute space to ASCs, said Amber Lewis, director of strategic marketing at Henry Schein Medical. “Many of these are a response to the impact of COVID-19,” she said.
For example, CMS’s Hospital Without Walls waiver program provided regulatory flexibilities to ASCs and the home setting. This was an attempt to relieve capacity constraints that hospitals had been experiencing at that time, Lewis said. The capacity constraints had been largely cited as a factor driving shifts to the outpatient space with physicians looking to clear their backlog or expedite their ability to serve patients by performing more surgeries at ASCs.
“Beyond COVID, there are forces that we’ve seen propelling site-of-care shifts for the first time, such as the expansion of covered procedures and freestanding surgery settings, and the adoption and utilization of management tactics for those higher complexity, higher cost procedures,” Lewis said. “There’s also greater standardization and specialization of care models, which should enable same-day discharges. And finally, we’ve seen rapid expansion of outpatient access points, particularly for ASCs, which is arguably the top benefactor of the shifts-in-care momentum that we’re currently experiencing in the industry as a whole.”
Lewis, along with Scott Jackson, vice president of surgical solutions, and Erica Smith, surgical solutions manager, were panelists of a recent Henry Schein Medical Webinar on ASC trends. The three Henry Schein Medical leaders provided insights into several topics affecting ASCs.
Read more in the latest issue of Repertoire Magazine.