high-quality, low-cost episodes of care. Given all of this, it should
come as no surprise that it's estimated that more than 50% of all spine
surgeries can be safely performed outpatient.
You could say that we were ahead of the spine curve. Way ahead.
We opened our first spine surgery center 11 years ago. We've since
built a second spine ASC. We've performed more than 9,000 surgeries
at both facilities — with a 99% patient-satisfaction rate and only 2 hos-
pital transfers (for unrelated medical conditions). We've never had a
death, never had a heart attack, never needed a transfusion and never
had a surgical infection. If you're considering adding spine, we sug-
gest you take advantage of all that we've learned.
1
Quality comes first
First, and most importantly, always emphasize quality over cost.
Spine is expensive, but more than half of the money spent on it
in the U.S. is spent dealing with problems — readmissions, infections,
chronic pain, failed surgeries and so on. If you tackle quality first, and
make sure you don't have those issues, cost will take care of itself.
In building our center, we used that philosophy for every compo-
nent. We worked extensively with sterile processing and we went to
great lengths to educate nurses and staff. We've tackled pain manage-
ment, mobilization, bladder management, patient education and fami-
ly education. We even built the facility with 100% HEPA filtration,
100% UV filtration and high-flow exhaust.
Quality is a never-ending pursuit. We typically have 4 or 5 quality
studies going at any given time, and one result is that we consistently
beat every national benchmark by a wide margin.
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