Administrator’s Corner: What is the best thing you ever spent money on at your center?

Erica Palmer

Senior Content Marketing Manager

No one understands the struggles and triumphs that ASC leadership experiences like those who have gone through it themselves. We understand Administrators, Business Office Managers, Chief Nursing Officers, Nurses, and everyone else who makes an ASC run successfully because at one point, we were standing right in your shoes.

Welcome to HST’s Administrator’s Corner 👋 Together, we’ll be addressing current issues that ASC leadership are facing to help solve your most pertinent and difficult problems. The advice below is proven and actionable, and we hope you find it helpful!

Question: What is the best thing you ever spent money on at your center?

Kathi Gascho, RN, BSN
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, HST Pathways
Former ASC Director of Nursing in Arizona

One of the things about ambulatory surgery that struck me immediately when I started in the industry was how hard the staff works and how invested everyone was in the success of the center. From the housekeepers to the administrator, everyone had a goal of providing the most efficient, cost-effective, and best patient care. Because of that I feel like the best money ever spent was on anything to support and reward the staff. This includes everything from regular lunches to holiday gifts or bonuses to buying a fancy Keurig coffee maker for the break room! When our center was acquired by a management company, we spent a week providing treats, gift cards, and prizes to the staff to remind them just how much we appreciated them! Exemplary patient care starts with your staff and they are really the best investment you can make!

Donna Griggs, RN BSN MPH
Clinical Training Specialist in Learning & Development, HST Pathways
Former ASC Admin and CNO for 16 years and RN for 30 years in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee

That’s easy – my employees! Anything from consistency, education, and standardization to honoring them on their birthdays, work anniversaries, and any nationally recognized holidays (ex. Nurses Week). Here are some examples of things I’ve done.

• Being consistent with evaluations, benefit information, policies & procedures, behavioral expectations of them and other professionals.
• Providing education often, timely and repetitively.
• Encouraging certifications, paying for them as well as providing a salary bump.
• Having a center-wide education day (no cases) with part of the staff as patients in different scenarios and then staff in their roles, then pull the fire alarm. Yes, taking the “patients” out of the building on stretchers, getting the tablets “charts” out with them, taking the crash cart, “acting out hysterical families” and all the other items to our safe place in the parking lot. It was very telling; it is one thing to read about it an entirely different thing to physically do it.
• We also had mandatory CPR for all staff, everyone has family.
• We also provided a standardized look in our center, by remodeling and updating our facility, our uniforms, our signage, where supplies were kept.
• Food, who doesn’t love a good potluck, we had them monthly sometimes surprising the employees and providing the meals entirely from a favorite restaurant. Lots of provided snacks (healthy and unhealthy) in the break room each day.

I firmly believe that the employees are the biggest assets in the business, and having governing boards, physician owners, hospital partners that also support those goals allows for excellent and exceptional patient care to happen every day in every OR and Procedure Room. I cannot finish without out also saying implementing HST Practice Management and HST eChart back in 2017 & 2018 was one of the best things we spent money on for so many reasons, the least being getting rid of the mountains of paperwork but the surgery book (yes the 4 foot long surgery book)! Oh the tales it could tell.

Pierre Devaud
Sales & Relationship Manager, Patient Access, HST Pathways
Former ASC admin for 7+ years in New York

It might sound corny since I’m now a paid evangelist for pricing transparency here at HST, but my vote goes to Clariti Health, now rebranded HST Price Transparency. Not only was it baffling to me that the task of educating our patients about their financial obligations was previously so onerous, but as a patient advocate, I sympathized with the challenge of facing growing surgical patient cost shares. As surgical providers, there isn’t much we can do about insurance plans expecting their subscribers to pay more but providing patients with as much time as possible to plan for the financial burden is the right thing to do… and it happens to be good business too!