COVID-19 has changed how all of us communicate. Chances are, you haven’t seen your patients in a while. So how can you increase patient engagement now?

As healthcare evolves daily, some crucial challenges remain for ASCs. What does the 2020 landscape hold? Consider these key challenges and what to do about them.

We live in a hyper-partisan, hyper-sensitive, hyper-litigious society. We are also addicted to our social media. The two can be an explosive combination.

The overall measure of a patient satisfaction score comes down to how patients feel about their care. While a patient’s impression of your facility can feel elusive, there are some tangible steps you can take to increase your patient satisfaction scores.

We had learned about the power outages and fires happening in California; we wanted to help.  

News Anchor: “California is burning...statewide utilities cut power to more than 209,000 customers to minimize the fire risk.” 

Paula: My name is Paula Schinning and I'm a Customer Success Manager here at One Medical Passport. We reached out to our California clients to see if we could help them get the word out to their patients about facilities closing or delaying surgery.

Sarah Sterling, an Administrator at Sutter Health: “It was 10pm when our center lost power. We were in a position where we just didn't know how to get ahold of our physicians, our staff, and most importantly, our patients. We needed to let them know the status of the center and their procedures”. 

Paula: We reached out to a couple of facilities and went ahead and turned on one time messaging through Passport Engage, our patient engagement solution. They were able to reach out to their patients pretty quickly.  We left it on for them just as they were kind of recovering from that, and then we had customers that were actively evacuating.

News Anchor: “Further north and Sonoma County conditions are even worse, forcing 200,000 evacuations”.

Paula: Some of the facilities had smoke in their OR’s and they couldn’t have access to their scheduling system. So, being at home, they were able to get ahold of patients to tell them “hey we're closed for the week due to the fires” and much more effectively manage their patient cases.

The clients were extremely happy because we were able to quickly do this for them. They want to be able to put these actions into place in their emergency preparedness plan, so, in the future, if there's these things, they know these steps to take.   Some of the administrators were out-of-state and they didn't have access to their computer systems on site. We were able to do this because we're a cloud-based solution and we have all that information for them. 

Sarah Sterling: “Now I'm more comfortable in knowing that I have that feature and I know that we'll be able to communicate with our patients and so it was very helpful.”

Paula: It was a very easy process for them and they were able to get ahold of us very quickly. Even on a Sunday, I noted that they are calling me from California, so, I answered the phone. I knew they needed help for Monday morning.

The Ambulatory Surgery Center industry is seeing unprecedented growth in 2020. According to the 2019 Ambulatory Surgery Center Market Report, the ASC market is expected to set an all-time record and surpass $40 billion in revenue in 2020 and is projected to hit $50 billion by 2025.

In 2018, nearly 22 million surgeries were performed in the United States with more than half being of the outpatient variety and experts predict this number to increase by roughly 15 percent by 2028. In recent years, more than half of outpatient procedures have been administered in ASCs. As healthcare costs continue to increase steadily, these statistics are expected to trend upwards in 2020 and beyond.

But why the unmistakable draw to ambulatory surgery centers in 2020? The reasons are many and certainly differ depending on each patient’s circumstances, but there are several key benefits that cement the role ASCs play in the healthcare industry.

At ASCs, the majority of your patient volume comes from physician referrals. Thus, keeping strong communication and relationships is vital to keeping your OR volume up. Below, we outline 4 of the best ways to improve your communication with physician offices.