streamlining the website's interface has been a critical part of our suc-
cess.
What 's a fair price?
We're not a charity — our facility needs to make money and so do our
surgeons — so we had to set prices that patients can afford, while
leaving reasonable profit margins. We also knew that setting a fair
price for procedures would make or break us, so we set out to deter-
mine how much to charge patients based on our case costs, what sur-
geons wanted to make and a lot of market research, including what
other facilities involved in price transparency were charging for the
same procedures.
First, we gathered surgical nurses, personnel in charge of buying
supplies and the staff who manage our current supply inventory,
combed through surgeons' preference cards and used data manage-
ment software to look up how much we spend on the 50 to 100 items
used by each surgeon for every case. It was an arduous process
that took months to complete, but it let us drill down to
the penny on what we spend on proce-
dures.
If a surgeon orders basic labs
that we do in-house, we include
the cost of the tests in the
one-time surgical fee, so
patients don't have to pay
extra. We charge patients
the wholesale cost of
implants, and we're
more than happy to
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