Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
Issue link: http://outpatientsurgery.uberflip.com/i/675723
Minimizing risk But both Sightpath and Vantage have seized the opportunity to go beyond that initial premise. Now they pride themselves on being as flexible as possible. Their focus depends on what customers need, says Mr. Swing. "That's really what our business is — it's a service beyond anything else." Mr. Gaslin agrees: "We're like the Geek Squad at Best Buy. People realize: 'OK, I've bought this technology, now what do I do with it? How do I make it work for me?' It's a very complicated device to run, and if you're not doing a lot of volume, you get people saying: 'Who's going to run this today? I don't really want to run it.'" The idea is to mitigate both technical risk and financial risk, he says. "I think of our business more as a service. It's a different way to access technology," says Mr. Gaslin. Sightpath, he says, now has a significant number of "fixed accounts, where we have equipment that lives there, and we provide some level of staffing for inventory management, as well as for managing the equipment and warranties." Flexibility can be key for a customer like the Allied Physicians Surgery Center in South Bend, Ind. "We used an outsourcing company for years and years, but we got so big here, we opted to purchase our own machine," says administrator Charles Strasser, RN, CASC. So big, in fact, that Allied Physicians is now considering acquiring a second laser, and mulling the potential advantages of again partnering with an outsourcing company. "They seem more flexible now," says Mr. Strasser. "They're actually willing to place it in our facility and train one of our technicians to run it. That way we can use it when we want it and we'll have our own in-house technician." Such an arrangement would also provide for a trial period, a chance to see whether volume will be sufficient to justify that second femto. "If we buy something and end up not having the volume, we're stuck 1 1 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • M A Y 2 0 1 6