many times we find stuff a lot cheaper online," she
says. "And Amazon's fulfillment facility is right
behind us, so that helps." Eye 35 even works with
another ASC to trade supplies to avoid paying
overnight shipping costs.
Ms. McCafferty and her team also convinced the
center's two surgeons to compromise on a single,
standard instrument tray, further slashing costs.
• Going paperless. The amount of time the cen-
ter's staff spent making paper charts was not time
well spent. Eye 35 finally transitioned to an elec-
tronic health record this summer. "We expect, and
our goal is, that within six months this system will
have paid for itself," says Ms. McCafferty. "It helps
to reduce supply and payroll expenses, it's made us
more efficient and our charts look much better."
• Verifying op notes. A nurse reviews all op
notes at the end of each day to check for mistakes
before sending them to a third-party billing depart-
ment. "We're making sure all cases are documented
correctly, because coding mistakes lead to money
we'd miss out on," says Ms. McCafferty.
Fundamental success
Due to the pandemic, case volumes were down in
June and flat in July compared with 2019 numbers,
according to Mr. Alvarado. However, he predicts
steady improvement in case volumes the rest of the
year. The center's proactive financial management
philosophy helped it survive and thrive during the
pandemic. Mr. Alvarado believes COVID-19 is ulti-
mately going to make the center even more finan-
cially solvent.
"I think we'll be more efficient moving forward
and pay more attention to our benchmarking num-
bers as well as our forecasting and actual num-
bers," he says. "If we had a lot of supply and capi-
tal expenses over the past few months, I don't
think our numbers would look as clean as they do
now."
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