to late in the evening by trauma cases or other cases perceived to be
more critical. With few exceptions, we perform all our add-ons dur-
ing daytime hours.
More surgeries = more success
Let's look at add-ons from a financial perspective. It's a simple equa-
tion: The more you can make your facility invaluable to your sur-
geons, the more financially successful you'll be.
At both of our facilities, we estimate that our fixed costs run $571.45
per case based on a volume of 14,423 cases. Every additional case
decreases that fixed cost per case.
Add-ons help to cover your overhead. Some of your biggest ongoing
expenses are the fixed costs associated with your facility, including
staff, rent, repairs, maintenance, taxes, insurances and utilities, which
you'll pay regardless of how many patients you operate on each day.
We figured that our facilities' fixed costs are $185 per case.
There are other fixed costs. We offer employer-paid benefits to all of
our full-time employees and we pay a proportionate share to part-time
employees. Benefit costs don't fluctuate with the number of hours the
employee works, making benefit expenses essentially fixed. There are
also a number of employees, salaried and non-salaried, who are at
your facility regardless of case volume. This includes the business
office personnel, maintenance, administration, accounting and more.
At our centers, staff costs and benefits account for $104.24 per case.
Finally, add-on cases are often profitable for us. Sure, there are a
couple that we will lose money on when the fixed costs are included
— but again, these costs are there regardless. For the purpose of this
article, I analyzed 11 add-on cases that we hosted in the last 2 months.
The average profit of 4 retina cases (one was performed on a
Saturday) was $1,088.79. An infertility case netted us $1,361.18. Two
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