Healthcare is a business and running a successful medical practice requires business-oriented leaders. However, physicians don't necessarily acquire business acumen during medical training.
Spine surgeons Khawar Siddique, MD and Brian Perri, DO, started Beverly Hills Spine Surgery in 2006. Four years later, Dr. Siddique started doing more management for the ASC and decided to go to business school to learn essential strategies to run a practice.
"Like any industry, you have to know the best practices. I didn't know what those were because they don't teach you that in medical school or beyond," Dr. Siddique said.
From 2010 to 2012, he attended University of Southern California in Los Angeles where he learned strategies to propel his surgery center forward into a successful business model. One key lesson Dr. Siddique translated to his practice was to always be on the forefront of innovation in the industry.
"One of the biggest problems in medicine is we tend to be static. What ends up happening is we do the same strategies over and over," he said. "At our practice, we always wanted to push the envelope and always be innovating."
To differentiate itself from other competing surgery centers and medical practices in the Beverly Hills area, Beverly Hill Spine Surgery adopted an integrated one-stop-shop, medical practice where patients can receive the entire spectrum of services necessary for their health condition. Patients can have their consultation, preoperative medical clearance, imaging, undergo a surgical procedure and stay in a post-op recovery center all in the same building.
"We wanted to improve quality by controlling all aspects of the spine and orthopedic value chain," Dr. Siddique says. "We first started by purchasing a 40,000-square-foot building in a prime location and then creating the infrastructure necessary for medical operations in that building. Then, we partnered with an orthopedic as well as a pain management group to build a combined Spine & Sports model. That was the strategy for our practice."
Drs. Siddique and Perri understood spine surgery was heading into the outpatient landscape and to value based care based on bundled payments. Within the next three years, a Spine study found several healthcare organizations expect bundled payments to cover between 30 percent and 45 percent of their spine volume.
As healthcare pushes practices to lower costs while maintaining quality, cases will transition to the outpatient arena. Earlier this month, CMS released its 2017 Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System proposed rule, which proposed a 1.2 percent payment increase for ASCs.
"There really is no question medicine is heading outpatient," Dr. Siddique says. "Many hospitals in our area recognize this and are acquiring ASCs because they know inpatient procedures like spine fusions, total hip and knee replacements can be done in an outpatient setting. By controlling the entire value chain, we want to be on the forefront of this trend and develop techniques and systems that do outpatient cases safely and in a cost effective way."
For more info on the group practice, please visit www.BeverlyHillsSpineSurgery.com.
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