Assessing Ambulatory Service Centers

Collecting the right data
"I believe the pay-for-reporting quality metrics will be good for our industry because it will raise the bar for all ASCs," says David Covert, CEO of Phoenix-based Banner Surgery Centers, which is part of Banner Health and has 10 outpatient surgery centers in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. "This ultimately benefits Banner Surgery Centers because we have carefully tracked our quality and patient satisfaction for years. In addition to our history of measuring performance, we also benefit from being part of a large system where we are encouraged to share best practices and benchmark against Banner hospitals."

Banner Surgery Centers track several Surgical Care Improvement Project indicators—hospital transfers and admissions, postoperative infections, patient falls, and patient burns. They also track patient satisfaction, on-time starts, turnover times, patient wait times, and employee sharps injuries.

"I think the new rule will improve the outcomes because I think when you begin to measure things you begin to improve them and the public begins to ask about the quality of the service you deliver," says Marlon Priest, MD, CMO of Bon Secours Health System, a $3.3 billion not-for-profit Catholic health system based in Marriottsville, Md. "[The data] is bit of a challenge to collect in some markets, but if you look at the list it will improve the outcomes."