Quality reporting is a crucial strategy for improving your ASC's efficiency while ensuring patient safety. However, increasing OR volumes and CMS survey requirements mean that quality reporting can easily consume many extra hours. Here’s how you can improve without bankrupting your most precious resource—time.
Why does quality reporting matter?
Most ASCs are certified to receive Medicare reimbursement. With this designation, however, comes a series of quality reporting and accreditations to stay on top of. Accreditation guidelines evaluate ASCs on a series of quality measures that directly tie to reimbursement rates. More and more, these quality measures are having a direct impact on your surgery center’s bottom line.
Boost your satisfaction surveys
While patient satisfaction surveys are voluntary for quality reporting, showing good patient experience scores is valuable. Better quality reporting leads to getting more patients through the door in a cost-effective, safe manner.
Deploying these patient surveys can easily take up too much extra time if you don’t have a plan in place. Patients are more likely to complete surveys if they have a digital option and can complete the survey on their own time. To save time, invest in a communication platform that allows you to send patients targeted surveys after their surgery.
Increasing OR volumes
Increasingly, surgeries that used to be performed only in hospitals can now be done on an outpatient basis at an ASC. For patients, however, cost is a huge factor in where they choose to have their surgery. At ASCs, the price is often lower.
More surgeries mean increased revenue, but increased volume also creates more opportunities for things to go wrong. ASCs need sophisticated software that can help them identify risks and areas that need improvement. Surgery centers also need strategies to keep track of the increasingly full OR board. Digital OR boards that update in real-time can save your staff time while enhancing patient communication simultaneously. That’s a win-win for everyone.
You need specific tools
A four-year study by the National Institute of Health found that ASCs need unique tools to improve quality reporting. Digital charting, scheduling, and integration with the medical record can improve quality outcomes in crucial areas by reducing:
- Preventable hospital transfers
- Infection rates
- Same-day cancellations and no-shows
For example, enhancing patient education is a key measure of increasing quality and outcomes. However, it takes a lot of time for your staff to sit and make reminder phone calls or send specific patient education emails. Rather, an automated communication plan that integrates with the medical record can enhance patient education while saving you time and money.
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