Value-based care is something Geri Eaves, CEO and administrator of Franklin-based The Bone and Joint Institute of Tennessee Surgery Center, sees growing in healthcare, especially with ASCs.
Ms. Eaves joined the "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" to discuss healthcare trends she's watching closely.
Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: Are there two or three trends that you're particularly excited about and why?
Geri Eaves: One of the trends that we have seen during COVID-19 was the telemedicine expansion. That doesn't necessarily affect me and my center, but we've seen a lot of that, and I think it's going to continue to grow even today. A lot of facilities have adopted this practice, and I think it's going to be a great thing for growth for some facilities. The other trend that we're going to see is value-based care. There's going to be a continued shift from fee-for-service models to value-based care in healthcare and surgery centers. Value-based care is focused on improving patient outcomes while we control the cost. So ASCs are increasingly incentivized to deliver a high quality of care, leading to patient satisfaction and reduced healthcare spending. That's something that we strive to do on a daily basis.
[Another] trend that we're going to see is technological advancements. Every day we see something new out there. … We're seeing something every day in technology that's advancing. It's revolutionizing healthcare, how we deliver healthcare and how we're improving patient outcomes. As we enhance surgical precision, reduce recovery times, improve patient satisfaction, those are just going to grow and grow. Digital health solutions such as electronic health records, the EMRs, mobile health apps, [and] all of this is just going to continue to help with streamlining workflows and improving communication between patients and providers, as well as ourselves.
Q: In regard to joint replacements, we saw bundled payments kind of seem like a race to the bottom, so to speak. What kind of value-based care do you think would be the most beneficial for an organization like yours?
GE: Value-based care to me is when you look at a hospital system and they have so many ancillary services [and] they have so many other ways that their cost is driven up, and it's more than what ours is necessarily. We do so many things with so few resources. With the total joints, we bring our patients to our facility for three to five hours, whereas if they go over to the hospital they may be there for eight to 10 hours, [and] their recovery takes longer.
I'm not saying as a whole everyone's that way, but you do see that the time spread is longer in the hospital versus the surgery center. When we're doing things, we're doing them more efficiently. With that said a lot of our people in the surgery center wear multiple hats. So we're saving costs on our side from the surgery center and the cost is less for the patient. That's where we see value-based going, and total joints is the same way. It's an expensive procedure to have. It's an expensive implant, and so where that cost is sometimes something that we can't change, we can change the outside costs that we bring in.