Under New Ownership
What aOrn's acquisition of Outpatient Surgery means to you (it's all good).
I
f you haven't yet heard the news, last month AORN acquired
Outpatient Surgery Magazine, a merger that in some ways resembles
an acute care hospital buying an ambulatory surgical center that it paid
little mind to when the ASC first opened.
Not many people noticed when Outpatient Surgery launched in 2000. On
a shoestring budget, a skeleton staff laboring in a cramped attic over a law
office cranked out the very first issue. There was no guarantee there would
be a second, but the timing turned out to be impeccable. Ambulatory sur-
gery had just surpassed the inpatient variety as the most common type of
procedure done. There were just under 3,000 surgery centers, but that
number would more than double over the next decade as surgeons left
hospitals in droves to build their own efficient surgical factories.
"The idea was to create a sort of community center for the people who
lead surgical facilities," says OSM founder and publisher Stan Herrin, "and
to help them talk with one another about how to do outpatient surgery
more successfully, more safely and more profitably."
In no time, surgeons were performing increasingly complex procedures
in their facilities, thanks to minimally invasive surgical techniques and ad-
vances in pain control. Stripped of surgery, their most profitable service
line, hospitals lobbied long and hard against the disruptive element that
was physician-owned, for-profit ASCs, but the field was changing and
growing rapidly.
Most important of all, patients loved the convenience of same-day sur-
gery — like dry cleaning, in by 9, out by noon — and payers loved the cost.
And our readers loved the magazine, in large part because they didn't feel
all alone in performing their incredibly difficult jobs and because each issue
brought solutions to the problems they were facing. We quickly became a
popular, dependable tool for keeping up.
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 • J a n u a r y 2 0 1 7
Editor's Page
Dan O'Connor
