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Bill Hazen - How Marketing Your ASC Improves Revenue
157 Plays2 years ago
Are you ready to start marketing your ASC?! Our host Nick Latz sits down with Bill Hazen, the Admin/CEO at Surgery Center at Pelham, who uses different marketing tactics to drive revenue and their Total Joints program. From billboards to radio ads to local sponsorships - Bill gives our listeners a look into how he's using consumer-driven healthcare to improve their bottom line.
In our news recap, we'll cover new tech that has entered the ASC industry for the first time, the importance of hosting an open house, and some industry stats on specialties, ORs, and more.
Articles Mentioned:
Discharge 1-2-3 Expands Into Surgical Centers to Enhance Pre- and Post-Operative Care
Q2 2022 Industry Overview by ASC Data
Mom runs hair salon inside hospital to pamper parents of NICU babies
Brought to you by HST Pathways.
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Transcript
Introduction to This Week in Surgery Centers
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 guest, 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.
Marketing Strategies with Bill Hazen
00:00:27
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Here's what you can expect on today's episode. Our host, Nick Latz, spent some time catching up with Bill Hazen, the administrator and CEO at the Surgery Center of Pelham. Bill and his team in South Carolina are doing really impressive things when it comes to marketing their ASC, specifically their total joints program. And during the episode, Bill really breaks it down step by step on exactly what he's doing so that other ASCs can experience the same success.
00:00:55
Speaker
We'll close the episode with a few new stories. We'll start with some new tech that has entered the surgery center industry for the first time. Look at an ASC in Wyoming that recently held an open house and discuss why that matters. Dive into some data that was recently published about the ASC industry specifically. And of course, end the new segment with a positive story about a NICU volunteer in Indiana. I hope everyone enjoys the episode and here's what's going on this week in surgery centers.
00:01:30
Speaker
Bill, welcome to the show.
Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Tactics
00:01:32
Speaker
Hey, glad to be here, Nick. Thanks for having me. Bill, if you don't mind, tell me a little bit about the surgery center at Pelham. How long have you been open and what types of surgeries do you provide? Well, we've been open 18 years this December. It's the second center we built. Our other one's been open about 22 years. We're open.
00:01:50
Speaker
four ORs, two GI rooms, multi-specialty. We do pretty much every specialty in length, pretty heavy on orthopedics and ENT surgery, specifically what I relate a lot to today is we instituted a total joint program.
00:02:08
Speaker
Total joint, fantastic. And one of the things that we like to do on this podcast, Bill, is dig into some of the aspects that go into running and operating a surgery center. And one of the things that intrigued me and stuck out to me based on researching you and your surgery center is the ability and the degree to which you guys do direct to consumer marketing. I was curious, what drove your decision to start marketing directly to consumers?
00:02:37
Speaker
Well, that's a great question, Nick. I mean, it's because surgery centers are very unique in the sense that, you know, everybody came to me for years, all the advertising companies want to do advertising. The problem is what, you know, as a surgery center administrator or CEO, you go, what am I selling? What can I advertise? And, you know, you're so dependent on your, like we're a joint venture between the hospital and physician. So you're pretty dependent on the surgeons of what they're going to bring. So you,
00:03:05
Speaker
You have to brand it, but again, what are you going to brand? So what kind of put us over the edge is we did total, we came up with total joint program. We had an orthopedic surgeon. We wanted to start doing total joints on an outpatient basis. And so then we had a product. Okay. So we had something to go out with. And that's kind of what started us to say, okay, now we, we can really make this happen.
00:03:29
Speaker
Got it. So it kind of centered on, Hey, we do a lot of, we don't do a lot of different surgeries. We have a lot of different specialties. If we're going to market, we got to start with a product or an offer. So it sounds like for you guys, that was a total joint product. Um, what types of marketing did you do around that?
00:03:47
Speaker
Well, with that being said, like I said, we wanted to Nick, we really wanted to brand. So, you know, there's several surgery centers around us and it, like I said, it's the same thing everywhere. So we're located very close to an interstate, major interstate run between Greenville, Atlanta, and Charlotte. So we started out with billboards and came up with the slogan of a new knee.com.
00:04:09
Speaker
And we built a website around that to where you go directly to a website. And all it taught was a knee showing that we're going to replace your knee in one day and send you home. So that was kind of a unique thing that got us started. And so then we started getting a little bit from that for website, but not what we wanted. So we jumped in local radio media and started to just push our program about our safety, how we could do it in one day, you know, and make it a very, like I said, safe process.
00:04:37
Speaker
and a costly process for compared to what a hospital did it for because we could do it so much cheaper. So that evolved and it takes a long time to get to where you just get branded. So then we started getting feedback from the public.
00:04:52
Speaker
about other physicians saying, you know, well, they're not really doing that outpatient, you know, they're just telling you they're going to keep you overnight. So we kind of tailored our program. And after we pretty much maximize that local market, and we had seen patients coming in, then we went to our media program and went to a more broad to where we started doing geo fencing. We do radio, we did a
00:05:19
Speaker
video that's on our website. We show surgical videos on our website. But an important thing that we had to do is that the culture
00:05:29
Speaker
that we came up with was I'm very blessed in the sense because I'm believable to have, you know, normally I have to go out and get somebody like you to talk on the radio that talks really well and does the commercial. I have a clinical director who is, she is just fantastic and can just rattle words off, has a very easy coming and she kind of cuts through the chatter on the radio. And then my physician was here also and what made that such a good thing is he's from Clemson.
00:05:58
Speaker
We do a large program with Clemson University, you know, and we do their games. So of course we have national publicity due to that. And with him being a graduate of Clemson, we can pull them right into the upstate. So when you call, so by doing our advertising, and I think this is crucial to any kind of marketing you do in ASC versus a hospital or somebody else, we're actually using someone that works here. So if you were to call up and say, you saw my commercial and you said, yeah, I need my need replaced.
00:06:27
Speaker
So you call up, you're going to go directly to Kathy Witham, my clinical director, the person you heard on the radio. And she's going to talk to you directly. Then we're going to send you straight to Dr. Armacita's office. And then you're going to see exactly what you heard on the radio. Both of these people did 100% of the commercials with one take.
00:06:51
Speaker
Sounds like you got some talent there. Right, so it just works for them. So I mean, that was a big thing in how we made this work. Fantastic, and that sounds like an innovative approach. And you mentioned a couple of different marketing channels there, starting with the billboards and going to the local radio stations. Was there a way for you guys to measure that, or did you get a sense for how is this working as you were going along?
00:07:20
Speaker
Well, we do use analytics. We use Google Analytics on our website. And we had to redo our entire website to make it more user friendly, especially from a mobile aspect. Because to start with, we were just drilling in a phone number. But then we started getting them to go so they could interact. Again, our website is done. The whole thing is done with people from the center. So what you see there, when you come here, you're going to see the same thing, which we feel is extremely important.
Transparency in Healthcare Pricing
00:07:49
Speaker
It's a culture.
00:07:51
Speaker
that we've sent that you're going to be taken care of by the same poop you hear on the radio are going to be the people that may walk you to your car. You know, so that judgment, as far as you can look at your analytics and you can geo fence, like I said, so we know it's kind of scary, but we know if they're in a competitor's office and then if that body is physically inside our four walls. So we can kind of judge if they were targeted there.
00:08:17
Speaker
And then if we had seen them here and on a joint, it's a little bit easier because we do a pre-assessment with the patient to make sure they're going to be good. And then we bring them in for the surgery. So by correlating between the two dates, and we know about what that is, we can say that's probably a joint. And then the other thing is we rely a lot on, you know, our orthopedic surgeon. He will come over here every week and say, you know, people walk in and go, Oh, I heard your commercial on the radio.
00:08:47
Speaker
Okay. Well, a lot of it's feedback, you know, a percent patient survey afterwards. And we do get a lot of comments about the way they found. But now what kind of kicked this along even further is we went to, you know, went to a transparency program that was developed, you know, clarity, and then we kind of pushed them. We went, you know, this is great. It works great for us. But, you know, everybody says the state said the government says you got to be transparent.
00:09:16
Speaker
So why don't we put that on a webpage, hence came out catalyst. So on our webpage, when you go to it, you go right up, you can put in your medical information, pick any procedure, get a price right then, either a cash price, or you can get a price by your insurance and your entire deductible, what has been paid to the minute. So you're using the same program we use, we just put a face on it. So now we got a second product to sell.
00:09:46
Speaker
Now you've got something good people. And this came at a perfect time with COVID. And when people started really looking at healthcare as a commodity that you have to purchase, deductibles are 5,000 plus. This is a cash business now.
00:10:01
Speaker
So what am I going to do? I have to compete. So my prices are truly, truly out there in a transparent way. It's unbelievable. And so now I don't have patients complaining about paying their bill coming in. They're very comfortable because they see and we educate. So the whole thing kind of joined together in that respect.
00:10:22
Speaker
That's fantastic. And you mentioned a couple of things there, Bill, that I wanted to ask about. So you mentioned potential patients, consumers coming into the website, getting estimates on the cost of procedures. It sounds like what you're describing is consumers researching and making decisions on where they wanted to have surgery on their own. Is that the behavior that you guys were promoting and driving? Yes, sir. Again, this whole thing, Nick, is you can't
00:10:51
Speaker
We can't really control where these patients go. You know, we did years ago, we did local community festivals, you know, with small giveaways and had a presence for two days, talk about everything. And the first thing, well, can Dr. Smith, Dr. Smith is my doctor. Can he do surgery at your center? And of course, your response is no. So again, that drives you, why would I ever advertise? Well, now you're going after the patient who truly can make the decision.
00:11:16
Speaker
and should be making the decision. So you have a person that's got to have a total joint, they go to a physician, you geofence them, you hit them with a surgery center at Pelham on their phone, oh they look, it's a total knee, let me see what it says, they look it up and they say they can go home the same day. Well then they have a number, they can call in and say we can get you right in to see our physician. So all of a sudden you're pulling patients away from
00:11:42
Speaker
in a roundabout way from other surgery centers or hospitals or physicians. So, you know, people are very interested in now what they owe. Because like I said, it's so much of its cash. I mean, 90% of what we do is under the deductible limit.
00:12:01
Speaker
And that's so interesting because that process that you described with the consumer-driven health care obviously is different than we typically see in terms of how patients are making decisions in this industry in general around location, right? Where it typically starts with the surgeon and the surgeon kind of dictating, hey, here's where we're going to do the surgery. What led you to test or what led you to believe that you could kind of flip the decision process like this? Is this something you've done before in your career?
00:12:31
Speaker
No, it was really literally it was, I think it was coming. The transparency thing with the cash, people will call and say, Hey, I called the hospital. I've been waiting 30 days. They can't even give me a price. All right. So now they know, um, or if they did get a price, they go, Oh my gosh, you're so much cheaper. So, you know, and like I said, COVID played into this because people did not want to be in the hospital.
00:12:57
Speaker
So I think that it just kind of really, to be honest with you, Nick evolved on his own that the patients found that they could get very quick response and they had a choice in the matter. And we do a lot of education on our website. You know, we'll talk a little bit about that later, about what you can really do to drive this home at the end.
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah. And that's super interesting. And so you're the CEO and administrator of your center and you develop this, what sounds like highly effective marketing program. Do you have a background in marketing or these just kind of things that you iterated and tested and tried? How did you develop this?
00:13:41
Speaker
Um, you know, I came from a hospital setting, started out as a nurse, had an industrial background before I went back to nursing. So it was just an evolution of got laid off from a job, looked at the paper. There was 25 nursing jobs and paper, always wanted to go into medicine. Didn't have the money to go to med school. So went into nursing and doors just opened. It's, um, you know, I'm a firm believer and it's a bottom up community. I mean, we work here.
00:14:08
Speaker
We do a bonus system with our employees. We take 5% of profits and we split it every quarter with all the employees equally. Everybody gets the same piece of pie. So I'm not a surgical nurse, never was.
00:14:22
Speaker
in other things in a hospital of a trauma type situation. So when I came here and I built the center and it didn't work out, I always say the adoption papers didn't go through. We hired an administrator and so six weeks later, here I was and now 18 years later, here I still am. But you know, you watch what's going on in the OR and you try to get the people. I said, what we try to do is a culture of ownership here. So
00:14:48
Speaker
It's just evolved into the marketing thing. Like I said, you have to just realize you have something to sell. And again, this transparency thing, even though a lot of people are pushing against it and saying the government's being intrusive and in some respects, I can see issues with that.
00:15:06
Speaker
The other thing is it's really fair to the patient. You don't go, I mean, you would never, I mean, a great example, I think I was, if you go out to eat and somebody else is paying the bill and they say, let's order a bottle of wine. You don't care if the price is on the menu or not. You're just good at looking for the best glass of wine. But if the price is on there and you're paying for it, then you're a little bit more, you're going to research and figure out what you want to do. And I think the more we can teach our patients,
00:15:36
Speaker
the more success we're gonna have in their rehab, in their outcome, and how they deal with you and your success as a center. Yeah, I love that perspective. I think that makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned, Bill, that kind of ownership mindset. And so I was curious, how was it in terms of getting buy-in from your physician owners around this marketing approach? Because it is an incremental expense, I would assume.
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah, it is. And it was interesting when I brought up, we were going to market and, you know, of course, again, we're half owned by the hospital, half by physicians. Physicians are always on my side. The hospital is more on the money side, you know, so, and they're like, oh, you know, billboards, is that a good thing to do? We don't know if that's a good thing to do. It's interesting. Our hospital system now has 27 billboards in the area since we started all this. But, you know, it was really all we did, Nick, was break down what we got paid.
00:16:34
Speaker
for a joint replacement and granted there is some costs with that and figured how many of those do I need to do before I pay for it? And amazingly, it's pretty quick. You know, basically we're doing about 30 joints a month. So in a week and a half, we paid for our year advertising. Sure. In terms of incremental case volume that you're able to generate. Yeah.
00:17:02
Speaker
Right. And now because, you know, you've replaced somebody's joint. They haven't had to be in the hospital for five days. They've done so much better. Well, now when their family member needs a gallbladder or their child needs their tonsils taken out, well, this was a great place to go. We've been very fortunate and we've been able to maintain a 99.9% patient satisfaction for 18 years.
00:17:23
Speaker
We had a very good response. So that's not a fluff number because you got 10 surveys back out of 500 patients a month. We get about 68 to 69% of our surveys back electronically every month. Wow, that's fantastic. And since we're talking about marketing and acquiring patients, is that something that you highlight in the marketing process, the 99.7%? Well, again, the transparency, I guess that's what, you know,
00:17:53
Speaker
If I could tell you anything today, okay, about a surgeon center is, like I said, people are becoming more educated, which is great, right? But they demand more accurate information. So the more transparency you can be with your pricing, we put our transfers, if we transfer a patient's hospital has to be reported to our state agency, we put it on our website. If we have an infection, we put our infection rates. So we show our true colors.
00:18:23
Speaker
If we make them, you know, something happens, not a mistake, but if, you know, you get infections, just be honest about it. And I think, so when people come to the website, again, this culture of the person you heard on the radio, that's who you talked to on the phone, that's who you're going to see sometime here doing the surgery. And you know, the whole thing. So it's a, it's kind of a family atmosphere that we kind of built. I mean, we do our streaming, we do everything with the same voices.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, I love the approach. I think it breeds familiarity around your oriented, around your service offering. Exactly, Nick. Having your joint replaced, and I keep going about a joints, but again, you've got to have something to sell if you're going to market either transparency or joints or something. But having your joint replaced, we've made it
00:19:14
Speaker
20 years ago, I said there was no way we'd ever do it. We do a tourniquet list with less than 50 CCs of blood loss, which is unheard of. Nobody doesn't need tourniquet lists. And you're literally in and out of the center in five hours and you're walking an hour after the surgery. I would have never believed that. This is a major surgery for most people. You got to think hard about whether you want to go through this. So the more comfort you can bring to that.
00:19:40
Speaker
And that's the other thing, you know, you need this consistency because you can tell somebody they're going home all day long, but they got to really go home that day. You know, we can't, we can't keep them overnight and it's not going to be pain free.
00:19:55
Speaker
You know, you are going to, so we don't do it. What's called a joint camp, which a lot of your viewers will understand what it is, but we do do a lot of education through the entire process. And I think that's the key to all surgery centers now is just working with your patients and educating them on what you really do. Right. That's right.
00:20:15
Speaker
And so you mentioned kind of a couple of things that are part of your formula. You mentioned, you know, the product, total joints.
Challenges in Marketing and Patient Education
00:20:22
Speaker
You mentioned kind of some of the promotion and the tactics that you do around it to drive eyeballs to, to the website. And then you've also talked a lot about price and price transparency and putting the price upfront on the website, which obviously can be hard to do in healthcare and hard to do in surgery. Cause there's so many factors that it's dependent on in terms of insurance and payors and deductibles of those sorts of things.
00:20:45
Speaker
Do you feel as though providing price upfront gets more of those consumers, those potential patients to actually continue and move forward in the process instead of just researching, actually call you and move forward and schedule? Yes, sir. There's a couple of things. With our transparency, we do have the availability to track who's on our website and call them what I like to say as a used car salesman. We do not do that. We don't do it.
00:21:12
Speaker
You can go on there. We're not going to track your name. You have to call us.
00:21:16
Speaker
We want you to reach out to us. So we're trying to just say, you know, we're going to, we're not going to try to sell you. You got to be sold to come to us. So then when they come, I think what's interesting is it's, I would say there's not a week go by and I try to speak with every patient in the center every day. That's part of my goal. I come in every morning. I speak to every one of the employees. And then I, during the day, every hour. So I make rounds through the surgery center and try to speak to every patient in some part of the process.
00:21:46
Speaker
And you know, so what you're doing is bringing them that comfort. And there's every week I'll have somebody say, well, you know, I, why'd you come here? You know, there's, there's nothing better than just asking the patient, you know, why didn't start in conversation with him again, to alleviate that stress. Why'd you come here? Oh, well I called the hospital and it was going to be $7,000. I had it done for here for 3,200. I had my deductibles, $5,000. I hear that every week.
00:22:15
Speaker
The other thing is, is they're having to pay a lot. We, we probably have cut down 80% of our calls when they received the bill and saying, Oh, I didn't realize I was going to owe you all this. Well, they're told up front. It actually, they get a printer and send an email to them. The other good thing for, from the administrator side, you wouldn't want to go as consumers. We track that email and that text.
00:22:41
Speaker
So when they show up and they know they've read, we know they've read it and they said, well, I didn't know I was going to pay $2,000 a day and go, well, Tuesday at four 15, you read the email. It's their digital records. Oh, okay. Uh, yeah, maybe I got to pay you the $2,000. So, but like I said, generally, if you educate people, they're less worried about the money. So I think that, I think transparency does drive your business and a cash price these days is very important because a lot of people still don't have insurance.
00:23:11
Speaker
And they're kind of the ones that get hammered in this whole deal. Sure. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you do a good job of setting expectations for these patients and for these consumers along in the process, which certainly seems like it's paid dividends down the road, both in terms of patient satisfaction and the patient satisfaction scores as well as getting paid and getting paid upfront.
00:23:35
Speaker
You mentioned your website a couple of times. It's kind of a central hub in this marketing process and this marketing program that you run. Curious, do you guys manage your website yourself or do you utilize a third party to help you with it?
00:23:48
Speaker
Well, newni.com, we went out there and just did it on our own. We made it. I love that name, by the way. And it was absolutely terrible. And then it kind of had the link to our other one. Our other one was very antiquated. So yes, we did go to an outside company. We don't spend a tremendous amount of money. Again, I'm very blessed in that everybody here wears multiple hats.
00:24:12
Speaker
And one of my clinical directors is very computer savvy so she can alter a lot of the things in it. But yes we use an outside company because it's really important to have the Google Analytics still get your response time to see where they're going on your your web page see what your bounce rate is.
00:24:31
Speaker
so you know where they're staying, how long they're staying, what they're watching. And you have to tie, again, the whole culture has to be, everything has to be the same and tied together because you are wasting your money if you cannot validate what you're doing is helping your business.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's an impressive, it's an impressive approach you've developed, Bill. And, you know, it was really fun to talk to you about it. Cause this is, this is something that, that not a lot of ASCs are doing. And it's, it's also fun to hear, you know, this isn't something that, that, you know, you went to school for, or, you know, had, had a bunch of years in your career of history around. It sounds like a process of experimentation.
00:25:11
Speaker
and trial and error, and how do we measure this and how do we validate and kind of tweak as we go, which is fun. So final question for you here, Bill, and we asked this every week to all of our guests, what is one thing that our listeners can do this week to improve their surgery centers?
00:25:29
Speaker
First off, Nick, I'd like to thank you for having me. I really enjoy this. As you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about it. We've built a great center here. I'm so proud of the employees and everything they do here. It's like I said, it's like a family. But again, I just can't reiterate, the most important thing you can do, and you can start this today, is even if you have to do a simple website or even just when you're dealing with your patients, be 100% transparent. Just tell them your good points and your bad points.
00:25:57
Speaker
You know, I mean, you don't want to burn yourself up, but don't try to hide things. Just, just be honest about what's going to happen, what it's going to cost and what their expectations are and what your expectations are too, and make it a partnership that that's probably more important than anything to do. And the other thing is I go back to this. A lot of centers will not do this profit sharing with your employees. You have no idea.
00:26:24
Speaker
on a quarterly basis. We do that in a check and we hand it to our employees how much that means to them because they are involved in what's going on. They know
00:26:34
Speaker
My pre-op nurses know that crayons cost 65 cents a piece. So they go in and they ask the child, are you gonna play with your mom's phone or are you gonna color? Because they don't wanna waste the 65 cents because for every dollar it's five cents in their pocket. And we cost live here, we're on a true EMR, we're paperless and so we cost every penny and we know when the patient walks out the door exactly what our profit margin is. So if you can get your employees to be owners in the business,
00:27:04
Speaker
you'll make money. Fantastic. Well, Bill, it sounds like you've got a fantastic center. Um, really enjoyed the conversation and hearing about what you're doing and thanks so much for joining us. Well, thanks again for having me. Okay. I appreciate it very much. Have a great day. Now stay tuned everybody for what's going on in the news this week.
Innovations in Patient Education Software
00:27:27
Speaker
As always, it has been a busy week in healthcare, so let's jump right in. In a press release posted to PR Newswire, we have some new tech entering the ASC industry. There is a company that provides patient education software called Discharge123 that has officially moved into the ASC space.
00:27:48
Speaker
Cloud Surgical Center is in Concord, Massachusetts, and they are the first surgery center to implement this software called Composer. So the company is Discharge123, and the software is called Composer.
00:28:01
Speaker
Now the company has been around for a while, but this is the first time that their software is being used in an ASC. What it does is provide patients with discharge instructions and educational materials that are easy to read in the language of their choice and really tailored to the patient and their experience.
00:28:20
Speaker
By providing documents like these to patients, I'm sure you can all imagine the benefits. The goal is to improve patient outcomes, improve patient satisfaction, and really build more efficient workflows for the clinicians as well. I'm sure everyone can agree the better we can enable patients to properly care for themselves after a procedure, the safer they will be and the better our outcomes will be.
00:28:45
Speaker
So we'd love to see ASCs adopting technology at any part of the patient's journey. So kudos to Clow Surgical Center for being the first here.
Open Houses and Community Engagement
00:28:55
Speaker
Our second story comes from ASC Focus, and it's about an ASC in Wyoming that recently hosted an open house.
00:29:03
Speaker
Now I know you're probably thinking, Erica, is this really news? And the answer is yes. It's news because holding an open house at your ASC is hugely important for multiple reasons. So this story is not only interesting, but will hopefully inspire you to do the same. So let's start at the beginning.
00:29:23
Speaker
Linda Bedwell is the administrator at Powder River Surgery Center in Gillette, Wyoming. Sounds like a beautiful place to have a procedure done. Now, Linda noticed two things. The first, 2022 is an election year, and not a single local official has mentioned healthcare or surgery centers on any of their platforms on a local basis.
00:29:47
Speaker
The second, patients were leaving the state of Wyoming to have procedures done because they didn't realize the high quality of care they can receive right in their backyard. So Linda decided to invite a bunch of people to her surgery center for an open house. She's invited local, state, and federal elected officials along with their staff, local primary care physicians,
00:30:12
Speaker
the center surgeons, insurance carriers, the Wyoming Hospital Association officials, and supply chain professionals. So she brought everybody from all sectors of their local healthcare community to this open house.
00:30:28
Speaker
And in partnership with ASCA, Powder Rivers Open House ended up being a huge success. And attendees were able to have meaningful discussions around health care in general and specifically the state of health care in Wyoming, which has its own unique challenges. And from the picture shared in the article, it looks like there were 12 plus guests in attendance. I'm sure there were more. That's just what I noticed in the pictures that I saw.
00:30:53
Speaker
And if I had to guess, everyone learned a whole lot about the surgery center's role in a community. And I'm sure Linda and her team made a huge impact that day and made a lasting impression on everybody who was there. So I thought this was a really cool story. And I think that the idea of having an open house is something that a lot more ASC should take on. And I know that ASCA has resources on their website as well to help everybody do just that.
00:31:21
Speaker
So really cool stuff coming out of Wyoming.
ASC Industry Growth and Trends
00:31:24
Speaker
And switching gears to our third story here, ASC Data, if you haven't heard of them yet, they're a company that provides one cohesive data source just for our industry, which is really such a blessing, if you think about it, to have our own unique data set that is not lumped in with other healthcare sectors. So ASC Data released their Q2 2022 data
00:31:48
Speaker
and there are a few numbers I thought would be good to share, just to kind of set the scene on where the industry is at right now. So looking at the industry at a high level, there are now 6,087 Medicare certified ASCs across the country, which is actually a 0.4% increase from Q1. And again, I'll put a link to all the data I'm about to share in the episode notes
00:32:16
Speaker
If you're a visual person, I know sometimes it could be tricky to follow numbers presented like this, but definitely go look at some of the graphs that ASC data has come out with. They're really interesting, and you'll notice that all these numbers are increasing, which is always good to see. So roughly 6,000 Medicare-certified ASCs, and out of those,
00:32:36
Speaker
50.6% of those are single specialty only, which is really interesting that it's almost exactly split between facilities that are single versus multi-specialty.
00:32:49
Speaker
The average number of ORs in an ASC is 3.08, so essentially three. And for a single specialty facility, the most common specialty is endoscopy. And then for two single specialty facilities, the most common two that get combined are orthopedics and pain. I just thought that was interesting to think about it like that.
00:33:15
Speaker
And then lastly, one more stat for you, more than 80% of surgeries in the country are now performed in an outpatient setting. So again, just going back to the importance of those open houses and all these other things that the industry is doing to build awareness in our communities that so many surgeries can be performed in our facilities.
00:33:38
Speaker
So the goal in sharing these numbers with you is just to give you a sense of where the industry is at and to show that ASCs are growing and thriving. And when ASC data releases their Q3 numbers, we'll be sure to share those as well.
NICU Volunteer Initiative and Impact
00:33:53
Speaker
And to end our new segment on a positive note, the Today Show shared a story about the mom of a former NICU baby who has opened a hospital beauty bar to pamper and spoil the parents whose babies are currently in the NICU. Sarah Pulley is her name, and she opened up her beauty bar just a month ago. And it's on the third floor of the Ronald McDonald family room in the maternity tower at Riley Children's Health in Carmel, Indiana.
00:34:22
Speaker
And for no charge, she will shampoo, blow dry and give scalp massages to any parent who recently delivered in the maternity tower and has a baby in the NICU. Sarah shared in the article some really sweet exchanges that she's had with parents during her time volunteering there. And as you can imagine, everyone is really grateful for her time and her support. So great job, Sarah. And that news story officially wraps up this week's podcast.
00:34:52
Speaker
Thank you as always for spending a few minutes of your week 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'll see you again next week.