Response to Physician Ownership/Referral Study

"Ambulatory Surgery Centers Are Strengthening a Critical Funding Source for Safety-Net Hospitals"

Craig Jeffries, former executive director of AAASC (now merged as the ASC Association), sounds off on the recent study examining the affect of physician ownership of ASCs on the referral patterns to ASCs.

Jeffries says the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Commission (PHC4) data is “a rich resource” for understanding the value of ASCs in a modern health care system. However, he notes, “the authors compared the wide range of services provided by the HOPD with the limited scope of services ASCs in Pennsylvania are permitted to provide. A far better comparison is to carve out the procedures in the HOPD that are also available from an ASC,” he says.

Moreover, Jeffries notes that the authors give physicians no credit for making appropriate referral decisions despite the stark difference in discharge to home for ASCs (99+) compared with the HOPD (85 percent) available in the data they presented.

“A more valuable impact assessment on how ASCs support the funding of safety net services of the hospital is the documented savings that ASCs bring to the healthcare system through savings for employers and taxpayers when a procedure is done in an ASC rather than in the HOPD,” Jeffries wrote in an email to today’s surgicenter. “A 2004 analysis showed that Medicare would have paid $464 million more that year if no procedures were performed in the ASC – and those are funds that can help safety net services.”

Jeffries wrote a lengthy response to Health Affairs about the study.  To read the full text Health Affairs article, click here.

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