what? Per our process, we pay anesthesia a rate of $500 the first hour
and $100 for each additional 15 minutes. Of the remaining collections,
the facility and physician share is based on the amount of supply
intensity, but usually breaks out at 55-60% to the facility and 40-45% to
the surgeon. So for a $1,500, 1-hour case, the breakdown would look
like this: $550 for the facility, $500 for anesthesia and $450 for the sur-
geon.
For price transparency to work, it's critical to collect from patients on
the day of surgery so that you can reimburse your anesthetists and sur-
geons that day or the next day. You want zero days in AR so you don't
spend months chasing money from patients (see "Get Patients to Pay
in Full on the Day of Surgery" at osmag.net/ZxWt5K).
Many people are concerned with how you handle costly implants,
specifically when you don't know how much will be used. We charge
our patients our invoice cost as an add-on to the facility fee. To let
patients know there'll be an extra cost after the case, we add an aster-
isk to implant cases on our online pricing menu. It would be ideal to
incorporate implants into the bundled price, but we don't always
know what implants we'll use until after the case. If you underesti-
mate implant usage on a rotator cuff repair, for example, where
anchor use can vary significantly, you'll likely lose money. We've
explored the idea of folding implant costs into our online prices and
refunding patients if we end up using less than we'd anticipated. (You
never want to come at patients a second time to ask for money.)
An unintended benefit of price transparency is that your surgeons
might become more keenly aware of their supply and implant costs. If
they see a colleague producing similar outcomes with lower case
costs, they might be motivated to economize themselves.
D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 3 1
