ASC leaders reflect on an eventful year for the outpatient surgery industry
As we approach the end of 2024, it's a good time to look back at the year that was. For ambulatory surgery centers, it was another eventful year — one mixed with many successes as well as some challenges. Overall, it was a generally positive year for ASCs, and one that sets the industry up for even greater success in 2025.
To gain some insights into what made 2024 a positive year for ASCs, we asked several leaders from Surgical Information Systems (SIS) to share their thoughts.
Dr. Paul Alcock, Chief Information Security Officer, Surgical Information Systems: Throughout 2024, ASCs continued to prove their value as efficient, high-quality care providers, becoming the setting of choice for an increasing number of procedures. However, this progress was met with rising cyber threats that presented significant challenges to surgery centers and healthcare providers as a whole. High-profile cyberattacks on organizations like Change Healthcare and Ascension disrupted operations and exposed vulnerabilities in our interconnected healthcare ecosystem. These events underscored a critical truth: the healthcare industry remains a prime target for ransomware, phishing, and supply chain attacks, which became more sophisticated and widespread this year.
In response to these challenges, it was encouraging to see ASCs take meaningful steps to enhance their security posture. Many centers focused on improving access controls, expanding around-the-clock threat monitoring, and strengthening protections across their systems, networks, and third-party relationships. This growing recognition that cybersecurity must be treated as a business imperative has been a significant step forward.
At SIS, we remain committed to delivering secure technology solutions and fostering industry collaboration to help ASCs navigate this evolving threat landscape. By prioritizing cybersecurity and learning from the challenges of 2024, I am confident the ASC industry is building a stronger foundation for 2025 and beyond.
Lindsay Hanrahan, Vice President, Product Management, Surgical Information Systems: A huge 2024 achievement was the launch of SIS Insights, which provides SIS Complete customers with the ability to create, save, and share reports and dashboards. SIS Insights provides foundational templates for common reporting needs while also allowing facilities to customize and enhance their own version of that report, including the addition of visualizations. ASCs can also create a new report from scratch and save it for ongoing use. Providing our customers with that level of control over their data is a huge win that we're thrilled to deliver. Based on customer feedback, our plans for 2025 have me very excited to further evolve this great new product.
Another exciting part of 2024 was that the shift to the cloud continues to drive greater adoption of interoperability among our clients. This seems to be driven by ASCs being in "change mode" when upgrading their software. They are taking a fresh look at opportunities for process optimization and how technology can improve the patient, provider, and employee experience. SIS Complete eliminates the need for many third-party ASC-specific tools, which ironically eliminates the need for integrations many clients had in the past. However, ASCs are now integrating with parts of their broader ecosystem, which can have a huge impact on the overall value of their technology investment.
These shifts are empowering our clients to rethink workflows, reducing redundant tasks like data entry, decreasing risks of errors, and improving patient, provider, and staff experiences. The average number of interfaces per SIS client has grown from around one interface to more than three interfaces. This reflects broader integration with the likes of referring practice management systems, health information exchanges, hospital systems, and laboratories as well as the more commonplace integrations with medicine cabinets, transcription services, and billing services. Thinking about these efficiencies across all our customers is such a source of excitement and motivation for me and my team. We're passionate about ensuring our integrations are user-friendly, cost-effective, and solve real problems for our users. We feel lucky that we get to do this every day.
Angela Mattioda, Senior Vice President, RCM Solutions and Client Experience, Surgical Notes, part of Surgical Information Systems: When looking back at 2024, I see several great developments for ASCs. One of the biggest wins goes back to a decision made in 2023, when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized the addition of total shoulder and total ankle arthroplasty, as well as several other CPT codes, to its ASC-approved list for 2024. It was rewarding to see many clients capitalize on this opportunity and begin performing these procedures on Medicare patients — and, most importantly, achieving great outcomes. CMS changes are imperative to continuing the rise of ASCs that are helping to reshape the healthcare industry to provide optimal patient care and options that are more convenient and cost-effective with reduced risk of infection.
Another benefit to the CMS changes is the increase in pressure on insurance companies to better negotiate reimbursement for implants so ASCs are not discouraged from performing these approved procedures. I have experienced better contract negotiations with commercial payers and noticed a willingness to add carve-outs and implant reimbursement.
Separately, it is encouraging to see tremendous strides being made in addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities that were laid bare following the Change Healthcare cyberattack in February 2024.
Finally, I want to call attention to internal efforts at SIS to further our capabilities in providing exceptional revenue cycle management services. Advancements are empowering us to streamline workflows and strengthen efficiency while also providing high-level oversight and allowing complete transparency into the overall accounts receivable health of clients. These improvements are enhancing our services and helping our ASCs bolster their financial performance.
Nate Kiely, Chief Strategy Officer, Surgical Information Systems: I saw a significant, positive trend in 2024: An increasing number of ASC management and development companies adopting greater standardization across their organizations. This standardization has manifested in various ways, particularly through streamlined operational workflows and technology solutions.
These companies have started to experience immediate benefits from these initiatives. They have led to substantial improvements for their ASCs, including increased efficiency in service delivery, enhanced reporting, better sharing and implementation of best practices, and more personalized attention from management companies. Additionally, for vendor partners, standardization within these management and development companies has resulted in more cost-effective services, quicker service delivery, and streamlined support.
For management and development companies, the move toward standardization has resulted in significant efficiencies, increased staff productivity, greater cost savings, and improved return on investment from vendor services and solutions. It has also facilitated enhanced scalability.
Given these clear and substantial advantages, I anticipate that management and development companies will continue to explore opportunities to leverage standardization further. I look forward to collaborating with SIS clients to identify ways to incorporate and expand standardization, ensuring that 2025 becomes an even more successful year.
Todd Logan, CASC, Chief Growth Officer, Surgical Information Systems: 2024 has been a remarkable year for SIS, marked by strong organic and inorganic growth. We've successfully expanded our software and services offerings, enabling us to address a broader range of challenges faced by ASCs, including in the area of revenue cycle management. As surgery center claims have become more complex and the need for detailed documentation and follow-up work has intensified, many ASCs are finding it increasingly difficult to find and cost-effectively employ the experts required to secure appropriate reimbursement and collections.
In response to these challenges, SIS has seen a record number of clients choosing to outsource either full-service billing or individual services like coding. This shift highlights the growing need for specialized expertise in the revenue cycle process, which many ASCs struggle to maintain internally.
The recent acquisition of Surgical Notes further strengthens SIS position as a clear leader in the ASC industry, not only in software and revenue cycle management, but also in transcription services. With this strategic addition, SIS is more equipped than ever to help our clients navigate the complexities of the ASC revenue cycle and ensure that they collect all that they are owed and do so in a highly efficient manner.
Jessica Nelson, Vice President, Revenue Cycle Services, Surgical Information Systems: 2024 was a year of significant strides in technology advancements that have led to improved key performance indicators (KPIs) for our revenue cycle team and clients. I am particularly thrilled with the deployment of a denials management solution that has reduced clients' days in accounts receivable by 11% in 6 months, thus accelerating cash flow for our surgery centers by 5-9 days on average. It has allowed us to further streamline our operations and better position our team for growth.
The acquisition of Surgical Notes was also huge for us. Their team has an impressive and extensive track record of supporting ASCs. Our combined industry expertise and knowledge in the ASC space is great news for clients and further positions SIS as the go-to provider of surgery center business office and revenue cycle operation services and solutions.
Katie Pierson, Director, ASC Solutions, Surgical Information Systems: In 2024, I saw an encouraging shift towards more ASCs adopting electronic health records (EHRs) to enhance operational efficiencies, streamline data management, and better ensure profitability. ASCs are continuously challenged with staffing shortages and, at times, suboptimal reimbursement. These and other challenges are motivating centers to find ways to automate administrative tasks, such as scheduling, billing, and coding, to help improve productivity and performance.
I have had the pleasure to watch real-time success with SIS users this year in reducing the time spent on manual processes and minimizing errors that could lead to costly delays or compliance issues. I have also had the opportunity to watch how the data insights provided by SIS helps ASCs identify trends in patient care, operational bottlenecks, and revenue cycle performance, thus enabling better informed decision-making that drives strong clinical outcomes and financial sustainability.
Another successful and ongoing trend I observed this year was a significant expansion in cardiovascular services. Procedures such as angioplasty, catheterization, and certain valve repairs, which were once primarily performed in hospital settings, have increasingly moved to ASCs due to their minimally invasive nature, shorter recovery times, and ability for ASCs to deliver great outcomes. Improved reimbursement rates for outpatient cardiovascular procedures have helped make these services more accessible for patients, which has led to lower costs and provided faster recovery times for those fortunate to undergo these procedures in surgery centers.
Thomas Pinelli, Vice President of Product Management, Surgical Information Systems: I can proudly say that we continued our record of delivering significant improvements and substantial value to SIS Complete users in 2024. We made many improvements to the platform and added impressive new functionality, including big enhancements to SIS Complete's Enterprise capabilities.
We've added a feature called "case flagging" where users can categorize different cases the way they wish and highlight important information about a patient or case that can be viewed by other users at a glance. It's very site (ASC) configurable. We have added more configurable mandatory fields to better ensure standardization and documentation. We have improved performance in contract management and reporting across the board. We have made great improvements to our eligibility insurance verification functionality that we're currently rolling out.
We have added functionality to case coordination in the form of a request for information (RFI) tool so that ASCs can better coordinate to get the items and documents to process claims faster.
Another noteworthy development concerns SIS Insights, which is accessible within SIS Complete. It's our new self-service reporting engine that allows ASCs to create, save, and share their own reports.
Going into 2025, we're making improvements to our anesthesia information management system (AIMS) based on our client feedback.
Speaking of client feedback, our client "delight initiative" was, once again, a huge success. This initiative sees us dedicating teams to executing and delivering on great ideas that come from our clients — and they have many great ideas. This initiative was so successful in 2024 that we've added even more teams to complete more client delight items.
Daren Smith, Vice President of ASC Solutions, Surgical Information Systems: 2024 was a tremendously encouraging year for ASCs from a technology perspective. Surgery centers are increasingly embracing technology, including the likes of automation and artificial intelligence, as young as it is. ASCs are further motivated to invest in technology because they are recognizing the value of using solutions to help improve the quality of care, better ensure patient safety, and enable more efficient and cost-effective processes. It came as no surprise to me that we continued to see the number of ASCs choosing SIS Complete rising throughout 2024.
Outside of technology, this year saw ASCs further cement their position as the optimal site for a growing number of surgical procedures. We are seeing patients, physicians, hospitals and health systems, commercial payers, legislators, and even private equity firms recognizing the impressive value ASCs deliver and the key role surgery centers will undoubtedly continue to play in our healthcare system. As more and more care moves to the outpatient setting, ASCs are perfectly positioned to capture these cases and deliver significant clinical and financial benefits.
