TRENDS
The Acceleration of ASCs ASCs are gaining both more patients and importance in the marketplace, but they have their share of unique challenges.
There are several traditional care shift drivers that have been present for years in the Ambulatory Surgery Center
(ASC) space – things like payment incentives across sites, and minimally invasive surgical techniques that permit surgeries to occur on an outpatient basis.
But there are also new drivers impacting the shift of care from the acute space to ASCs, said Amber Lewis, director of strategic marketing at Henry Schein Medical. “Many of these are a response to the impact of COVID-19,” she said. For example, CMS’s Hospital Without Walls waiver program provided regulatory flexibilities to ASCs 42
February 2023
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and the home setting. This was an attempt to relieve capacity constraints that hospitals had been experiencing at that time, Lewis said. The capacity constraints had been largely cited as a factor driving shifts to the outpatient space with physicians looking to clear their backlog or expedite their ability to serve patients by performing more surgeries at ASCs. •
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“Beyond COVID, there are forces that we’ve seen propelling siteof-care shifts for the first time, such as the expansion of covered procedures and freestanding surgery settings, and the adoption and utilization of management tactics for those higher complexity, higher cost procedures,” Lewis said. “There’s also greater standardization and specialization of care