CASCA Spring Meeting Focuses on Emerging Issues for ASCs

CASCA Spring Meeting Focuses on Emerging Issues for ASCs

The Colorado Ambulatory Surgery Center Association (CASCA) held its annual spring meeting in late March in Denver. With a theme of “Emerging Issues in the ASC Industry,” the event featured a diverse slate of speakers addressing pertinent issues. Naya Kehayes, MPH, the chief executive officer of Eveia Health Consulting, LLC, discussed trends in managed care contracting and how evolving methodologies will impact ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). Kelly Pyrek, editor of today’s surgicenter magazine, advised attendees on strategies relating to media relations, crisis communications, and facility reputation enhancement. Pyrek encouraged participants to interact with the media proactively, instead of reactively, and to use all forms of media as a vehicle through which to tell the story of the benefits of ambulatory surgery, its high quality patient outcomes, and the cost savings ASCs represent. She also asked attendees to consider participating in the annual ASC Open House Day as one way to demonstrate to communities what ASCs are all about and to foster partnerships with area physicians. 

Participants also learned from Doug Jackson, MD, how they can become involved in Project C.U.R.E., an international volunteer aid effort that is collecting, distributing, and providing donated medical/surgical supplies to developing nations all over the globe and at the same time, keeping unused supplies from being dumped in U.S. landfills. The need, Jackson said, is unfathomable in a country such as the U.S. that has access to the finest supplies and technology in the world. The medical horror stories abound; for instance, in Kenya, in an area of growing HIV/AIDS infection, nurses boil used needles over a fire before reusing them. In the Sudan, doctors lack scalpels and blades and are forced to use the lids of tin cans to perform surgical procedures — without anesthesia. In India, post-surgical patients are transferred to their room on a flat, wooden “wheelbarrow,” as there are no gurneys, and in Mexico, doctors lack sufficient casting material to bind broken bones, so amputation is the offered alternative. In Ecuador, a 350-bed hospital has no clean suture, so stitches are removed from one patient, dipped in alcohol, and used in another. Healthcare professionals can help by signing up their facilities as a Project C.U.R.E donation location, and working with the organization to divert all usable supplies and equipment to these needy clinics abroad. For more information, go to www.projectcure.org. CASCA executive director Jake Allen asked all CASCA members to participate, to reach the goal of achieving 100 percent participation by September. 

The event was not without a significant political component. John McManus, president of The McManus Group and the lobbyist for FASA, delivered a presentation, “Political Reality Check for ASCs Now That the Players Have Changed,” which gave participants an update on events on Capitol Hill. McManus alluded to the Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment Modernization Act, H.R. 1823, which was introduced in the House of Representatives on March 29 by the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) and Rep. Wally Herger (R-Calif.). H.R. 1823 would expand the types of services performed in ASCs, giving Medicare beneficiaries access to a higher number of procedures that today they can only do in the hospital; it would provide Medicare a 25 percent discount on what they pay for the same procedure in the hospital outpatient payment department (HOPD); and it would apply the inflation factor used to update HOPD rates to ASC payments. The bill has been referred to both the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Committee on Ways and Means. 

Continuing in a similar political vein, the CASCA event also featured a town-hall meeting between participants and Colorado lawmakers Sen. Brandon Shaffer and Sen. Shawn Mitchell. Attendees asked a number of questions central to reimbursement and contracting issues, including the passage of Colorado’s S.B. 79, the nation’s first fairness and transparency in managed care contracting legislation. The bill will create standardized contract language between health insurers and physicians, will decrease the administrative burden on physician practices; will require payors to disclose payment terms in plain language; will require payors to give physician groups advance notice of proposed contract changes; and will prohibit payors from requiring physician groups to accept “all products” clauses in contracts, which obligates them to accept any payment rate or insurance product that the insurer may later create, without practices’ consent. 

The CASCA spring meeting was co-produced by FASA and was sponsored by Surgical Notes, QSE Technologies, Krause Kirkpatrick Bertrand, Kahl & Associates, LLC, Centura Health, Caplan & Earnest, LLC, Colorado Business Bank, Alpine Surgical Equipment, HealthSouth, Stryker Medical, Pinnacol Assurance, and Boulder Associates. For more information about CASCA, go to www.cascacolorado.com