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00:00:01
Erik Sunset – Three ASC Problems That Technology Solves
128 Plays1 year ago
Erik Sunset, the VP of Marketing at DocBuddy, joins the show today to discuss how technology can effectively address the financial and operational challenges faced by many surgery centers. In this insightful conversation, we explore the potential of technology to tackle three key issues: staffing, workflows, and revenue cycle management. Additionally, we delve into relevant EHR topics, including Meaningful Use, government mandates, and the delays in technology adoption.
In our news recap, we’ll cover certificate-of-need laws, Ryan Reynolds’ live colonoscopy, how culture can help to combat labor issues, and of course, end the news segment with a positive story about an experimental drug that has shown to 'significantly' slow progression of brain cancer.
Articles Mentioned:
Certificate-of-need laws stunt ASC growth — but change in some states may be imminent
What GI Centers Can Learn from Ryan Reynolds’ Live Colonoscopy [Article]
What GI Centers Can Learn from Ryan Reynolds’ Live Colonoscopy [YouTube Video]
Leveraging Culture to Combat Labor Issues
Experimental drug shown to 'significantly' slow progression of brain cancer
Brought to you by HST Pathways.
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to This Week in Surgery Centers. If you're in the ASC industry, then you're in the right place. Every week, we'll start the episode off by sharing an interesting conversation we had with our featured guests, and then we'll close the episode by recapping the latest news impacting surgery centers. We're excited to share with you what we have, so let's get started and see what the industry's been up to.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Here's what you can expect on today's episode.
Technology's Role in Solving ASC Challenges
00:00:31
Speaker
Eric Sunset is the VP of Marketing at DocBuddy, and today he joins me to talk through three ASC problems that technology can solve. Now, of course, there are many more than three, but on this week's episode, we'll be addressing how tech can help you with staffing, workflows, and revenue cycle management.
00:00:50
Speaker
We also chatted through some EHR hot topics such as meaningful use, government mandates, and technology adoption lags. In our news recap, we'll cover certificate of need laws, Ryan Reynolds' live colonoscopy, how culture can help to combat labor issues, and of course, end the news segment with a positive story about an experimental drug that has shown to significantly slow progression of brain cancer.
00:01:19
Speaker
Hope everyone enjoys the episode and here's what's going on this week in surgery centers. Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show. Hey, Erica. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Great. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background, please?
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, you got it. I'm Eric Sunset. I'm the VP of Marketing and Biz Dev at DocBuddy and DocBuddy's headquartered in Denver, Colorado, but I am located in not so sunny today, Miami, Florida. Awesome. And what were you doing before you got to DocBuddy?
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, great question. I am, I'm a health IT lifer at this point. I actually got my starts in health IT selling EHRs, selling marketing, managing EHR resellers, eventually led an acquisition of a reseller to a Dallas based EHR called Prima. They were required by EMDs. I went over to EMDs and then from there got into revenue cycle management with a group here in Miami.
00:02:22
Speaker
And the opportunity to join DocBuddy presented itself about two years ago, and that's an exciting change of pace for me. Electronic health records and revenue cycle management services are critical obviously to the operation of whatever type of healthcare organization you're talking about.
00:02:40
Speaker
But it's not always that organization's favorite vendor for obvious reasons. And we'll get into that a little bit during our podcast today, but it's exciting to be able to delight providers and their staffs now with DocBuddy.
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. We are big fans of DocBuddy at HST. So we're really excited to have you on today to cover how technology can help solve three ASC problems. Obviously there are way more, but today we'll just cover three of the big ones. So let's jump in. You got into healthcare and health IT as a meaningful use was rolled out. What was it like to see that unfold?
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, that was, that was truly a wild ride. We'll set the table for your listeners here by going all the way back to 2009 when the high tech act was, was rolled out. That obviously had a meaningful use incentive and penalty tied to it. I know a lot of our ASC listeners would be, well, I've been spared that, that heartache of your first go around with an ambulatory electronic health records since ASCs were not a part of that bill.
00:03:47
Speaker
But going all the way back to 2009, if you believe it or not, your mechanic would have had a better capability to tell you when you're due for maintenance on your car.
00:03:56
Speaker
then your physician would have for your annual wellness check. Software is really the only way that you can do that. And despite the exorbitant cost of this program, a lot of spears being thrown at meaningful use here. There is some good, we're going to get there, but despite $35 billion that it costs the country, despite our lack of true interoperability, I hate to say it, but just speaking the truth here,
00:04:20
Speaker
And really despite some of the massive negative impact these ambulatory EHRs have had on physician satisfaction, it was an absolutely necessary step for the country to bring us into the 21st century reality really of digital healthcare. So you end up with improved quality and safety for patients. You have data foundation for healthcare informatics to actually use. Then you get some other positives like better patient communication and transparency in your care through things like patient portals.
00:04:50
Speaker
So through all that, you'll notice I didn't mention the ASC at all. We're talking about practices and hospitals, really. Logan already said the ASC space was spared this meaningful use mandates, just the way that the bill was written.
00:05:04
Speaker
And there are certainly technologies in place at ASCs, but unfortunately the ASC seems to lag even in greater regard to technology adoption than the peers at both practices and at the hospital. So it's just not to the full scale of adoption yet. We have this debate internally all the time. Do you think that legislation is ever coming for ASCs to adopt an EHR?
00:05:32
Speaker
I love to pontificate on that. You got to think that there's going to be something coming down the line only because so many procedures are coming off of that IPO list, especially cardiologic type procedures going into the ASC.
00:05:47
Speaker
So part of me is somewhat, would be somewhat open to a push by the federal government to say, hey, we need some more technology here. Our CMS money is reimbursing for these procedures now as less and less, or as more and more things come off the IPO. And I think it's something like 50% of all procedures are now being done in the ASC. And I think as you start to get more and more Medicare money, you're reimbursing for those procedures, it will probably become a hotter topic.
00:06:15
Speaker
But on the other side of that, the debate is that what did meaningful use really get you? The end goal was interoperability, but we don't have that. So we have a digital, we have digitized healthcare and we don't necessarily have what we were promised. So that'll be an interesting debate. It makes me glad, you know, among many reasons that my job isn't in Washington DC. I have to fully vet that out, but it'll be very interesting to watch. Where do you fall in that debate, Erica? Yeah.
00:06:45
Speaker
It changes this time last year. I would have told you, no, I don't think it's ever coming. But in the CMS had recently asked.
00:06:55
Speaker
ASC is how they feel about it. And I just think asking that alone while it is a baby step, it is a step. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like they're going to go about it in a roundabout way. They're never going to actually mandate it, but to be able to do reporting, quality metrics, and all this stuff, the only way to efficiently get to that would be to have an EHR. So whether they officially mandate it or just indirectly mandate it,
00:07:24
Speaker
We'll see. Yeah. Maybe you and I are better suited for a job on Capitol Hill with two kind of non-committed answers. Maybe yes, maybe no. But I think you raise a very important point that some of the efficiencies that you want to gain with a reporting capability that a business like an ASU would want to have necessarily comes from technology like an EHR, especially one like HST offers.
00:07:50
Speaker
And when you look at some of the market forces surrounding ASCs, considerate amounts of investment, huge amounts of investment, either by PE or other entities like health systems into their own ASC ecosystem. I think there's going to be more and more questions asked of ASC owner and operators about what's going on underneath the hood that you really can't answer without the right technology. Yep. Agreed.
00:08:15
Speaker
All right, we're going to have to put our political careers aside here. Let's get back to some other topics. So one of the biggest challenges we hear from our clients is, of course, around staffing. COVID obviously was devastating in terms of exacerbating an already existing issue. And it's obviously tough to deliver services or do anything if you don't have the staff to facilitate it. What is the connection between technology and staffing?
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. COVID was absolutely brutal for hiring. And I'll share a quick anecdote that a fairly large multi-location, multi-physician primary care group here in Florida offers extremely competitive wages. They offer benefits to their employees. So going way above and beyond in an HR sense.
00:09:05
Speaker
And they just cannot hire a single soul to help them. And we're talking about mission critical processes at this group where they just literally cannot make a hire despite doing everything they can. And despite doing all of the right things to attract great talent to their organization.
00:09:22
Speaker
So I'm not one to tell you exactly why that is still happening. COVID is obviously a no-brainer why it happened through the pandemic. But now that we're kind of out the other side, you just got people that are frantically working to fill positions, but it's just not happening. So where you have the shortfall in labor, and it's a classic healthcare fix, right? If you have a problem, let's just hire somebody. We'll just throw people at it until we don't have a problem anymore.
00:09:49
Speaker
And unfortunately, that's no longer an option. Maybe that wasn't the right thing to do to begin with. But when you have a labor shortage, you have got to look outside of just hiring more FTEs to fix the problem. And that's where technology can really help fill a gap like that.
00:10:06
Speaker
This is a really low hanging fruit example, but the easiest one that I can give is with phone calls being made to confirm procedures with patients. And there are absolutely ASCs taking advantage of services that automate this and remove this as a manual task from their list. But for everyone that does, in my estimation, there's probably two that don't. So with these ASCs,
00:10:29
Speaker
Where you're still using labor to fulfill a really low operational requirements and by low operational requirements obviously important that people come in for their appointment that's not the lower requirement but the ability to confirm that appointments.
00:10:46
Speaker
Your better option is very obviously you need to be using some type of automated patient calling technology that integrates with your PM, right? Because we're talking about technology replacing a labor gap or augmenting an
Streamlining Staffing with Automation
00:10:59
Speaker
existing process that's strictly manual. You want to have as much benefit as you can for your technology spend.
00:11:06
Speaker
So baseline would be something like an automated caller or a texter, probably text preferred these days. People don't like the phone calls from random numbers and then to take it to the next level of being able to integrate that patient feedback into your PM. Really with the goal of giving your staff, giving your FTEs the very least amount to do in one work.
00:11:29
Speaker
So what do I mean by that? You want to be handling exceptions. You don't want people calling through a day list just because it's there. You want to be handling the outliers with technology, pointing out, Hey, this person had an issue with their appointment. Hey, we need this form from this patient, whatever that is. You don't want to be doing strictly manual tasks just because you can.
00:11:52
Speaker
And I think you said it perfectly. I just wrote it down. Handling the exceptions is exactly what everybody, your talented, limited staff should be doing. And to your point, ACs endure tough workflows, whether they have adequate staff or not. Being able to help them out as much as you possibly can is huge.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, and we'll take it into point number two here. We talked about technology being able to augment a limited workforce and hopefully you're not limited. I'm obviously not rooting for that, but the reality is most organizations across all industry are short-handed to some extent through this COVID oddity. But the next item is that there are some processes that are absolutely critical to the operation of your surgery center, but you're doing something in a way that's not standardized.
00:12:43
Speaker
So put yourself in an ASC operator's shoes for a moment. Think of all the ways that you're receiving a surgery order. Is it by fax? It's by email and hopefully it's an encrypted email and not just the Gmail or an Outlook. Obviously we've got PHI at stake. Is it phone calls? Is it a carrier pigeon or smoke signals or all of the above?
00:13:06
Speaker
So take it a step further and obviously give a somewhat silly example, but do all the different practices that send you surgeries, are they all sending you their procedures the same way? And are all of the surgeons at all of those individual practices relaying that they want to schedule surgery with you the same way?
00:13:24
Speaker
We're to laboring the point here, but you can see how large ASC that handles a wide variety of procedures. It can get complicated really quickly. So we've already established into fact, you're working with limited staff. You can't just throw people to track down all of the different ways you get procedures. I need you to check voicemail three times a day. I need you to look in our surgery order or email box 10 times a day, or have it on your phone. Really the way you solve these non-standardized workflows has got to be with technology.
00:13:55
Speaker
and not only standardize it, but centralize it into one stream and full credit to our ASC administrators, operators, and scheduling departments that can deal with all of the clutter. But when you think about how the rest of industry handles what's very clearly a problem.
00:14:12
Speaker
Let me rephrase that. What's at best an inconvenience and at worst a significant problem where you're having to chase, whether it's voicemails, post-it notes, emails, like we said, whatever the case is, the rest of industry would not tolerate this. And there are absolutely ASCs that have it standardized and streamlined and they're a high performing ASC. But again, for everyone that is, there are many more that are not.
00:14:38
Speaker
So by using tech to standardize and centralize this process, you're eliminating what amounts to just a pure cost for your staff's time to be able to eventually get all these procedures scheduled. And then to go one more step into the pain, into the hurt locker of this, what about all the forms that you need completed to actually go through with that procedure?
00:15:00
Speaker
So you might be getting requests for scheduling through the phone or picking up a voicemail or from a fax. But then what about that patient's H and P's? What about the consents? What about a prior authorization?
00:15:13
Speaker
What about all the different things you actually need to have in place before you can even perform that procedure? So as an ASC administrator, as a listener of this week in surgery centers, think about all of the ways that everything is a one-off or is different than the next one that you're going to get.
00:15:31
Speaker
technology is how you resolve that waste, and I'll call it what it is, that waste of FTE time, consolidating all of this down, and then being able to communicate with the practices with which you work. Hey, patient X who's scheduled two weeks out from now, we don't have any of their forms. Can you send them to us in this one way we deem as the only way to get procedures onto our schedule?
00:15:55
Speaker
Yep. And I think I know the answer to this, but to clarify, you're not advocating that surgery centers should adopt tech to reduce staffing and headcount. No, absolutely not. Okay. No, you've, you've hopefully gotten to stop by the doc buddy booth at ASCA or your state ASC shows that nobody loves our ASC employees more than doc buddy. And I think I can speak for HST there.
00:16:22
Speaker
Absolutely. Just for a quick example, if you are in the very fortunate position as an ASC operator or manager or owner, and you have enough staff, you have adequate staffing, good for you. The goal with technology at your ASC isn't to go around and say, you know what, I can reduce headcount by 20% if I adopt these few technologies.
00:16:46
Speaker
There will be edge cases and probably not in this post COVID world, but there, there are potential for edge cases where maybe you are overstaffed. Uh, but it's a flashback to my revenue cycle management days. The recommendation is not ever to reduce your head count just for the sake of it. Um, unless there's a compelling reason or maybe an HR issue, obviously we're speaking in generalities here. What I would recommend is that if you do end up adopting a technology and hopefully that technology saves you a ton of time.
00:17:15
Speaker
And the recommendation there would be to get your employees that have been, had their time reallocated to tech or tech saving that time, move them to something more meaningful. And obviously the lowest hanging fruit there to use that phrase again, something like patient accounts, something that needs constant attention, something that you need people to do automated patient accounts. I can really only get you so far. So that'd be my number one place to look.
00:17:42
Speaker
And again, hopefully everybody who's listening to their AR is low and it's been 30 days and everything's current. But obviously that's, that's not always the case.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, I know we're always trying to toe that line too of making it clear. Yes, technology can help save time and improve all these efficiencies, but it really only works if you have buy-in from your staff and from the people who are going to be using it and truly understand the value and the ins and outs and how it works and having those super users. So I completely agree.
00:18:13
Speaker
Yeah, and that, if I can step only there, that ties into one of the core tenants of management, right? Like hopefully you've got a great culture where you bring a technology to the table and everybody's ready to adopt and they see the value. But if you're, have ever been in any type of HR capacity, you'll know the most expensive employee you'll ever have is the one that you now have to replace. So to be able to hang on to good work is just critical, especially when you can't really make a hire in 2023.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Now you had mentioned revenue cycle management and that's a great segue to our third problem that technology can solve for an ASC.
Revolutionizing Revenue Cycle Management
00:18:53
Speaker
So tell me more about that one.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah, this is a, this is a sneaky problem on our list of three here. And it's accepting that the status quo is good enough. And sometimes part of your status quo is a technology or a service, or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just a strictly manual process for you right now. But Erica.
00:19:16
Speaker
Would you believe that it is a widely accepted and adopted practice that even in brand new state of the art ASCs that are costing over $30 per square foot to build, you know, at least 30 say, one of the most critical aspects of their operation, which is their revenue cycle. It's utilizing a mechanism with a built in lag, a built in time delay.
00:19:43
Speaker
It's crazy. When you put it like that, it sounds crazy. And I'm obviously being dramatic. I want to have something interesting to listen to, obviously. But that's the truth. And I'm talking about the use of a transcription service to generate operative reports. And this is one of those things that it's, this is how we've always done it. It works. This is good enough for us. And we don't need to think about changing.
00:20:06
Speaker
And any self-help or any motivational book you ever read or any management book for that respect, if you're settling for the status quo, because that's how you've always done it, you're in trouble. You may not know it. You may not feel like you're in trouble, but that is not a good reason to keep doing things the way that you've always done them. So to paint you a little bit more of a picture, here's what I'm talking about with the inherent lag. So you're a surgeon, Dr. Palmer, you've just completed your procedure.
00:20:34
Speaker
And now you're either going to do your dictation that then goes out to transcription service, or maybe you wait till the end of your day to do all of your dictations at once. Either way, example holds. Once those go out, either procedure by procedure or all at once at the end of the day, you're going to wait some amount of time for your transcribed dictation to actually come back to you for your review. And hopefully it's right and accurate. And if it's not, you supply the edits.
00:21:03
Speaker
And obviously there's, there's a lot of discussion to be had around how long that takes, how much are you paying for the transcription service? What's your SLA? So maybe it's a couple of days, maybe it's a couple of weeks. In any case you're waiting and potentially waiting again, if you had any edits that needed to go into that operative. And then finally, once you get back a completed final version of your operative report, then you're signing it and then it's going to your billing team.
00:21:31
Speaker
So you've performed the procedure, you've delivered a fantastic patient outcome. Now you're waiting on average about 15 days to have a signed and final op reports. And then, and only then are you really able to build for that encounter. So to me, you know, coming from the seat that I'm sitting in, obviously as a technology person, this is a highly unusual situation and the dynamic can get a little bit worse.
00:21:59
Speaker
I'm sure you hear a lot of the same things when you're at events like ASCA or any of the state ASC shows, but the number one complaint, and we've done some polling and some surveying on this, but the number one complaint we hear from ASC administrators and staff is that they're waiting on signatures. This is like 95% of the problems that we hear on a show for, so you're familiar with it.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yep. We hear that all the time. Okay. And then, uh, to build up another dramatic example, you know, what if you're not going to see that surgeon again for a week or two weeks, or what if you only see that surgeon once a month and maybe they're on vacation this month? That claims in trouble that claims in jeopardy before it even has a chance to be filed and jeopardy to timely filing, obviously.
00:22:53
Speaker
So we talked earlier about the lag in adoption of technology in general at the ASC. And this is where I predict my own prediction here is that the most rapid change in ASC technology adoption is going to come at the hands of the revenue cycle.
00:23:08
Speaker
As we've talked a little bit about the reporting that really only technology can give you, unless you've got a very complicated Kanban board, you're filling up with Post-its and all types of notes in your break room to be able to say how many procedures, how many of this type of procedure do we do in a month? How many are we predicting to do next month? And all the way down the line.
00:23:29
Speaker
But where technology I think will penetrate more fully into the ASC is at the hands of the revenue cycle than anywhere else. And then my guess was you'll be able to see broader adoption of all technology across the entire supply chain, the entire production line of the ASC as we go through time. Beautiful.
00:23:49
Speaker
Thank you. So just to recap our three problems technology is solving, we have staffing, we have more efficient workflows in general, and then the sneaky one helping to improve with revenue cycle management flows and reducing time to payment. Exactly.
00:24:08
Speaker
You hit the nail on the head. That speed to revenue point is often overlooked just because that's just been the gold standard for so long. You may not know or your listeners may not know that the technology and the service that underlies transcription as we know it, it's over a hundred years old and it hasn't changed in that hundred years really at all. Except maybe now it's on your smartphone sometimes, but you're still waiting. Sure. Yeah, that's good context.
00:24:35
Speaker
All right, Eric, one more question. We do this every week with our guests. What is one thing our listeners can do this week to improve their surgery centers?
00:24:46
Speaker
Oh, what a good one to end with. So we've talked about ways technology can improve your surgery center and what I would do, my recommendation to your listeners would be to list out the processes that you're managing manually. Something that you'd call the old way. Something that isn't technology enabled. Let's be clear, not everything has to be technology enabled to be good, but you end up with a process that you can control and manage much better with technology. So now that we got that caveat out of the way.
00:25:15
Speaker
List all of your processes you're handling the old way. Rank them in the order of the most painful to the least painful. And that could be time, that could be cost, that could just be frustration with what it is that you're doing now. And this may be somewhat self-serving for both of us even, Erica, but it's to start shopping. Once you've identified the key areas or the number one issue that's causing you pain at your ASC, get a cost benefit analysis together and start talking to vendors.
00:25:45
Speaker
And the reason for that is that most often than not, anything that you can purchase off the shelf that's commercially available will do better for you than something that's brewed from home. You end up with much better support. You end up with community of like-minded users to help you through that process. And then as you rinse and repeat through that list of identifying processes where it's strictly manual or it's the old way,
00:26:10
Speaker
and being able to replace them with technology, take that to your board and say, hey, I think I'm on to something here. We can save X amount of time per week or we'll have this much less waste if we look at technology. Perfect. All right, Eric, we appreciate all of your insight and thanks for coming on today. As always, it has been a busy week in health care, so let's jump right in.
Impact of Certificate of Need Law Changes
00:26:37
Speaker
According to an article in Becker's ASC,
00:26:40
Speaker
Certificate of need laws are likely to change in certain states. So in case you're not familiar, a certificate of need law requires healthcare providers, which includes ASCs, to receive permission to build new facilities. But the certificate of need approval process is lengthy and costly and difficult for many independent physicians, especially small ASCs, to try to tackle.
00:27:07
Speaker
And as you can imagine, the law differs in every state and in some states it doesn't even exist. The impact of the law though is pretty clear. In states where there's no certificate of need like Texas, there are 450 plus Medicare certified ASCs and they are thriving and continuing to grow. And then in other states, specifically like in the Northeast, growth is slow and complicated and can really be a headache.
00:27:37
Speaker
Now the Carolinas have been a focus recently because North Carolina is in a tough spot. They have recently been experiencing high economic and population growth, but they also have very strict certificate of need laws. So a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the law, but the state's court of appeals unanimously voted to dismiss the lawsuit, unfortunately.
00:28:01
Speaker
Now, I think this one lawsuit failed because the surgeon argued it violated his constitutional rights, which maybe just wasn't the right angle to take because there was one judge who agreed with him but still voted to dismiss the case.
00:28:18
Speaker
But as a very tiny babysit, the North Carolina Senate proposed its budget for the next two fiscal years with a provision that would allow single specialty ASCs to convert to multi-specialty ASCs without going through the certificate of need process. So there's at least that.
00:28:38
Speaker
And down in South Carolina, they passed a bill that removes certificate of need requirements for new ASCs, but the ASC must provide charity care after being in operation for two years. So all of that to say, it does look like the certificate of need laws are beginning to unravel in a lot of states, which will be critical for the industry's growth and for lowering healthcare costs.
00:29:06
Speaker
In our second story, outpatient surgery magazine is sharing what GI centers can learn from Ryan Reynolds live colonoscopy.
Celebrity Influence on Healthcare Awareness
00:29:15
Speaker
So if you're not familiar, about eight months ago, Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, lost a bet to his business partner and friend, Robert McElhenney, who you likely know from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and had to have a public colonoscopy.
00:29:32
Speaker
While it seems silly, Ryan's doctor did find and remove a potentially precancerous polyp, while Rob's doctor, who did ultimately agree to have the colonoscopy as well, even though he won the bet, removed three polyps. The video of the process that they put together and the procedure is on YouTube. I'll link to it in the show notes. It currently has over 1.2 million views and counting.
00:29:59
Speaker
But in terms of the impact that it had, online booking platform ZocDoc reported a 36% increase in daily colonoscopy bookings after the video launched. Social media posts talking about colonoscopy increased by 244%, and Google searches for colonoscopy and colon cancer rose by 129% and 113%.
00:30:26
Speaker
So while your ASC likely does not have the budget to hire celebrity ambassadors, this is a reminder that you shouldn't be afraid to get creative and fun and ultimately connect with your patients in a way that works for them. In our third story, the June-July issue of ASC Focus came out and there are some really great articles in
The Power of Company Culture in Staffing
00:30:49
Speaker
there. The one I wanted to share today is about how ASCs can leverage culture to combat labor issues.
00:30:58
Speaker
Now, it might seem difficult to prioritize something like culture building when your ASC is being faced with so many financial and operational challenges, but they share that this is actually the perfect time as your culture is the framework that will help you decide which team members are essential and potentially worthy of a raise, which contract nurses should be asked to come on full time, and which new interviewees you should hire.
00:31:25
Speaker
And to back that up, in a survey by Glassdoor, 73% of respondents said they would not take the step to even apply for a position unless the company's values aligned with their own, meaning that culture is key to recruiting and retention.
00:31:44
Speaker
So where do you begin? You should be able to identify your company culture in one to two sentences and make sure your entire team can do the same. And it's also thinking about the same values, attitudes and habits. But to get to that point where you can create the culture, you really need to ask for input from your employees. How would they describe the current culture? What needs work? And really this only works if you genuinely listen without interruption and with an open mind.
00:32:13
Speaker
Then you can leverage that culture in your job description and interviews to make sure you're attracting the right talent and make sure you're finding the perfect candidate for the job. Again, going back to that Glassdoor survey, it's not that people are applying and they're not going to be a good fit at your company.
00:32:32
Speaker
It's that they're not even going to take the step to apply in the first place if they don't understand and align with your company's culture. So just want to reiterate, putting it in that job description is key. And the last thing they shared, which I love, culture is not static. It will change as the world evolves and as your leadership and staff change. So make sure you're using it as a tool for growth and don't just set it and forget it.
Innovations in Brain Cancer Treatment
00:33:00
Speaker
And to end our new segment on a positive note, an experimental drug has shown too significantly slow progression of brain cancer.
00:33:09
Speaker
A new study found the experimental drug vorocidinib significantly reduced the progression of brain cancer, slowing the progression of tumors by an average of more than 16 months. Vorocidinib specifically works on grade two gliomas by blocking a specific enzyme mutated in low grade gliomas, keeping them from progressing and postponing the need for further treatment like chemo. And according to Wake Forest Baptist Health's Dr. Glenn Lesser,
00:33:39
Speaker
The results are quite striking and they're statistically highly significant. And more importantly, they're clinically very significant. The surveyor group is working to get the drug approved by the FDA for use in the US.
00:33:55
Speaker
And that news story officially wraps up this week's podcast. Thank you as always for spending a few minutes of your time with us. Make sure to subscribe or leave a review on whichever platform you're listening from. I hope you have a great day and we will see you again next week.