Many health systems are at various stages of migrating surgical cases from their inpatient hospital to outpatient sites of service, including ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs).
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on ECG's website.
Planning for surgery migration requires integration across multiple aspects of the health system, including facilities, operations, finance, staffing, and managed care contracting. What should not be overlooked, however, is optimizing the physician network, which is best addressed early in the migration planning process.
In an optimized physician network, providers are highly aligned with a health system, and the right services are available in the appropriate geographies and care settings to meet the needs of a specific patient population. Regardless of where a health system is in the surgical migration process, an optimized physician network promotes success in three distinct ways.
- A physician network that is optimized for surgical migration will have enough employed or aligned surgeons and referring physicians in network to support all new and existing sites of service. If a health system surgery migration plan includes growth in case volume to mitigate some reduction in inpatient revenue due to an outpatient shift, there must be enough surgeons and referring physicians to support that growth. Further, the location of new sites of service plays a role in evaluating the physician network. A new ASC located away from the main health system campus should have the physician network to support volume from both a surgeon and referring physician perspective. Click here to continue>>
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