Ep. 7: Tim Burney – Understanding & Negotiating Implant Costs | This Week in Surgery Centers

Here’s what to expect on this week’s episode. 🎙️

Implants are typically one of the top two drivers of cost for an ASC, but researching, analyzing, and dealing with implants costs can be time-consuming and nuanced.

Tim Burney, Founder, and CEO of Advantien, joins us this week to share how we can effectively better understand and negotiate implant costs to help save a good chunk of money and reduce implant spending. Here are a few ideas.

🤝 Keep an eye on the relationship between the Implant Vendors and Your Surgeons: Vendors are extremely valuable resources to ASCs and provide much-needed support for admins, nurses, and surgeons. But sometimes, vendors and surgeons can build such close relationships that the surgeon stops closely inspecting implant contracts and pricing, and the relationship can be exploited.

📊 Analyzing data = understanding costs: You’re already recording your implant data, but now it’s time to analyze it. Take the raw data, get it into a BI tool or another helpful format, and really dig in. What are you spending per implant per procedure? What is the data telling you?

📍 Negotiate costs locally: National benchmarking data is helpful to an extent, but you cannot rely on it alone. You need local data to ultimately negotiate the best prices. Implant costs vary by state, region, and payer – so find a local database and leverage the most powerful data available.

🏥 And lastly – the surgeons will still be critical: Share the data you’ve found with your surgeons. The decision is ultimately on them, so walk them through the data so they can have all the ammunition they need when they meet with the implant vendors to negotiate the best possible prices based on numbers and facts.

In our news recap, we’ll do a deep dive into the CMS 2023 final payment rule, talk about an uptick in plastic surgery cases, share a much-needed update from YouTube Health, and share the story of two police officers who saved the life of a 1-month-old baby.

Find the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube to hear all the details!

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