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O U T S O U R C I N G
Building block
Northwoods Surgery Center began outsourcing cataract cases as soon
as it opened in 2008. "I'm not sure we had a choice at the time," says
Mr. Foster. "But it was smart to do it that way. We didn't strap ourselves financially at the very beginning of our operation." Outsourcing
cataracts let his fledgling facility gain its financial footing and add
cases without capital outlay or investing in staff training.
Northwoods paid $620 per case ($570 base charge plus $50 travel
fee) and pocketed the remainder of the more than $900 in reimbursement it collected in facility fees. "It wasn't a great deal, but it was
good enough to justify using the service that first year," says Mr.
Foster. "We were making money."
No one would mistake Northwoods for a high-volume mega-center —
a single cataract surgeon performs about 10 cases a week, reserving a
morning block in one of the center's ORs — but the demand is enough
to justify offering the service to patients in the community. Besides,
aging cataract patients might return for other procedures, such as orthopedic surgeries and GI exams.
About 2 years after opening, when the center's revenues began to
climb, its leadership decided to invest in new cataract equipment and
strike out on its own. Physician-owners put more than $30,000 into a
phaco machine, $53,000 into an operating microscope and a couple
thousand more into instrumentation. "With the money we were generating from all the specialties, we had the $90,000 it took to add oph1 2 0
O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | N O V E M B E R 2012
