1. Measure patient satisfaction from the outset. Although measuring patient satisfaction is a general practice at most surgery centers, tracking patients’ experiences from the very beginning is critical to more quickly reaching success as a new facility. Ms. Laux measure patient satisfaction by having visitors fill out online surveys, which she says has a higher return rate than paper satisfaction surveys.
“We want to bring over the same level of excellence and service as Bellin Hospital does, which is the hospital we’re partnered with in establishing this surgery center,” she says. “We take the comments to heart. There was one patient who indicated in the survey that he was unhappy with the location, so I called him personally to help ease the situation. We can’t help our location, but that personal touch of getting a call from an administrator is always appreciated.”
2. Increase case volume by increasing the number of payor contracts. Ms. Laux says mimicking the hospital’s high volume is another established goal for Bellin Surgery Center, and she hopes to meet the goal of having approximately 80-90 percent of the hospital’s case volume. Although there are 10 orthopedic surgeons practicing at the facility who also work at the hospital, the key to bringing patients to the surgery center starts with negotiating more payor contracts.
“It’s been a challenge getting contracts in place so we can reach those volumes,” she says. “We’re trying to negotiate with big companies like Humana and Blue Cross Blue Shield so that patients who have contracts with those payors can come here. We already are licensed by Medicare, so Medicare patients are already able to.”
3. Track employee satisfaction. Another key to continuing success at newer surgery centers is ensuring the staff members it hires are in it for the long run, as high staff turnover eventually leads to decreased quality care and decreased profits. Ms. Laux routinely measures employee satisfaction to make sure the entire staff is happy working there and that they are invested in the mission of the facility.
“As soon as I started working here, I decided I would do employee satisfaction surveys with employees every six months and track certain metrics on a scale of one to five,” she says. “I track things like how happy employees are with their work hours, their benefit packages, whether they feel they’re being treated with respect and courtesy and how they feel about the overall teamwork of the OR team.”
Administering employee satisfaction surveys also gives Ms. Laux a better idea of what employees are unhappy with so that proper changes can take place, such as employee vacation time which Ms. Laux says many employees expressed concern over.
“A lot of them might have had as much as 4-5 weeks of vacation time at their old workplace, so they were worried about that,” she says. “I did a market analysis of what other organizations were offering their employees, compared that to what a new employee gets here, and took the data to our governing board. They agreed we needed to increase our vacation time, so now our employees have 22 days of vacation time instead of 17 days.”
4. Research equipment and supply needs early on. Ms. Laux says extensively researching equipment and supply needs early and often is essential to keeping the surgery center on the path to future financial success.
“We are trying to work with many different vendors because there are so many instruments and equipment available for orthopedics, so we’ve really done a lot of homework to see what the best available options are at the best prices,” Ms. Laux says. “As you can imagine, every surgeon has their own set of instruments they want to use, so the challenge is trying to find equipment/instruments that work well with all the physicians but at good prices. For example, we’ve finally decided that we were going to order from two vendors to get two different kinds of ACL trays for our physicians.”
Ms. Laux warns researching equipment and supply needs for a newer surgery can be challenging because case volume is constantly changing.
“Our case volume has been incrementally increasing every month, so the challenge is the timing of when to bring in new instruments and equipment because it’s all going to be based on case volume,” she says. “You need to closely monitor and take very educated guesses on when volumes are going to increase.”
Learn more about Bellin Orthopedic Surgery Center.
