The first Ambulatory Surgery Center was opened in 1970 in Phoenix, Arizona, by Dr. Wallace Reed and Dr. John Ford, two doctors who believed they could provide a high-quality, cost-effective alternative to the hospital.

The nearly 50 years since have shown how visionary those two doctors were. As of April 2019, the ASCA puts the number of Medicare-certified ASCs nationwide at nearly 6,000!

As ASCs continue to grow in surgical volume, total billing, and popularity among consumers, how can they best prepare for the future?

Interoperability: Are we there yet?

Without effective interoperability, practices can be stuck in the past. Today, health information needs to move quickly among physicians' offices and hospitals. The goal of interoperability is to allow this health information to flow securely among practices and facilities nationwide.

Not all illnesses are visible. Physician burnout is a long-term stress reaction marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of a sense of personal achievement. A 2019 report revealed that 44% of doctors are burned out.

In March 2018, there were 501,296 active physicians working in the United States. That’s more than half a million people who have dedicated their lives to the well-being of others. Just as important to the world of healthcare are the 234,000 licensed nurse practitioners and the 122,555 licensed physician assistants (as of 2017) who work tirelessly to keep people healthy.

Often, the constant time spent keeping patients healthy can affect a medical professional’s health.

In 2004, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services introduced Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) coding.

Evaluating patient risk is as old as medicine itself. As early as the fifth century BCE, notes a 2011 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Hippocratic tradition focused on the prevention of disease through diet and exercise. 

But ancient wisdom works best when combined with modern technology.

Can you believe that it’s been three years? Three years since MACRA ended the Sustainable Growth Rate formula for clinician payment and established a quality payment incentive program. The goal: To create a new way to reward eligible clinicians based on performance and health outcomes, rather than volume.

You know, quality over quantity.

In MACRA, there are two ways to participate in the Quality Payment Program – Alternative Payment Models (APMs) and the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). 

Matt Cady, Chief Innovation Officer at Florida’s Adult Medicine of Lake County, says that before his practice began using eClinicalWorks to track patients moving among care settings, they had a system in place: Post-It® Notes and spreadsheets.

In other words, in spite of having the cloud-based eClinicalWorks EHR, when it came to keeping track of patients moving from a hospital setting to home, they were still, in effect, using paper records. Each provider knew what was going on with their patients, but communicating that information to colleagues was cumbersome and time-consuming.

In 1968, Dr. Joel J. Nobel, a surgeon at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital, warned administrators that a hospital defibrillator wasn’t working. That same week, a 4-year-old patient died because of the same device.

When Florida medical practices talk about snowbirds, they aren’t talking ornithology. They are referring to the large subset of patients who spend the winter in the Sunshine State and scoot back North in the spring. Such patients pose one of the thorniest problems in medicine because keeping track of their health — from the specialists they have seen to whatever medications they are taking — can be a real challenge.

What kind of medical practices need an advanced tool for determining patient risk, projecting the likelihood of adverse health events, and processing each patient with the highest possible degree of specificity in coding for reimbursements?

Maximizing their clinical effectiveness while holding down costs is never easy, but for today’s medical practices, one sure guide is to follow the spending. And the evidence points overwhelmingly to one area — chronic medical conditions. 

How training can improve EHR satisfaction

One of the most familiar stories in healthcare IT is chronic dissatisfaction with Electronic Health Records (EHR). Study after study shows more than half of practices aren’t completely happy with their current EHR, although a much smaller number are actively seeking a new system at any given time.

It requires a great product and great training

Beginning in the early 1980s, a transformation of American medicine began that few medical professionals foresaw. And it wasn’t a miracle drug, a research breakthrough, or some dreaded new disease that did it. It was, to put it simply, the computer.

In 1841, 26-year-old Dr. Crawford Williamson Long inhaled nitrous oxide (yes, laughing gas) at a party and noticed something funny. Dr. Long noticed that even if you tripped and fell - instead of screaming in pain, you'd keep on laughing.

Healthcare has tremendous power to do good, but its very complexity can also bring complications. Nowhere is that clearer than when patients are moving from one care setting to another.

Dr. Martha R. Rodriguez used to have nightmares. Except she had them during the day. At the office.

“We were inundated with lists from the insurance companies,” said Dr. Rodriguez, founder of MMR Healthcare in Boynton Beach, Florida. “Every day we would get a new list — these patients have missing eye exams, these patients are missing mammograms.”

Dr. Rodriguez admits that her knee would sometimes shake when she was faced with yet another list of patients who were out of compliance with recommended exams, because she knew that the data on those lists were sometimes 90 to 120 days out of date.