As more orthopedic cases move to the outpatient setting, ASC leaders should continue to deepen their focus on optimizing patient care, Nyleen Flores said.
Ms. Flores, chief administrative officer of Greensboro, Ga.-based Lake Oconee Orthopedics, joined the "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" to discuss the role healthcare credentialing will have amid orthopedic outpatient migration.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: What are you most focused on and excited about right now?
Nyleen Flores: With this great migration and this acceleration, it's created a little bit of a gap. My personal passion is education, and I really come from a healthcare oversight and management background, which includes credentialing. And I'm not talking about the monster of provider enrollment and contracting with insurance companies, which we know it's very political and very frustrating in general. I'm actually talking about the privileging and credentialing with the healthcare organization, and I have a mission to improve and continue educating facilities and to include this special focus into surgery centers and improving their overall credentialing and privileging standards. This is because in a hospital setting, this has really been taken care of by a department, so perioperative or intraoperative staff never has had to worry about credentialing, which is why there's such a gap.
With higher acuity cases coming into the outpatient space, it creates the need to really focus on what we're doing to these patients and how we are monitoring this to optimize care in the outpatient setting, which is really guided by, protected by and focused by through the credentialing peer review process within a surgery center.
I don't think that surgery centers have caught up to the standards of hospitals, but yet we are performing the same kind of procedures now. So we want to make sure that our administrators are allowing a place for credentialing and ongoing monitoring of these higher acuity cases that are being performed. We, as surgery centers, are required to maintain logs to monitor complications, and to really do the same thing that hospitals are doing. But this is still being considered just a paper function when it really is so much more.
While we continue to grow in the outpatient space, I think that there is a need to focus and educate leaders on the importance of really what credentialing is in a surgery center and where it's going … and to be able to safely accommodate these types of procedures.
The other thing I am so excited about that I hope continues to move into this direction is electronic charting. We really need to streamline all processes and allow for appropriate reporting. It still hasn't been mandated for surgery centers to go electronic. But I feel that if surgery centers begin adopting this paperless model. We can stop killing trees with all this paper and reduce paper and start to promote digital transformation into the surgery center world, just to become more efficient and have a lot more accurate reporting than counting papers.