What’s the secret sauce for a successful ambulatory surgery center partnership?

Compass Surgical Partners CEO DJ Hill described the recipe in a recent interview with Ambulatory Surgery Center News.

Essential Element #1: Trust is the bedrock of your partnership.

“All ASCs are effectively partnerships” between health systems, physicians, and third parties — best-in-class developers and managers like Compass, Hill said.

During what Hill describes as the “courting phase” of an ASC partnership, prospective partners should ensure that everyone is all-in on “the fullness of need and opportunity.” A shared perspective creates business alignment as partners leverage their individual strengths for the partnership’s common benefit.  

But underneath all of this is trust. Do your prospective ASC partners have other trust-based partnerships that have succeeded? If they don’t, are they willing to go on that journey?

“The key to a successful partnership is based on trust, which is built on shared vision alignment, no surprises, and helping each other when issues arise, rather than pointing fingers,” Hill said.

Essential Element #2: Deploy a market-based approach.

“When we enter a market, we are looking to help our system partners capture the fullness of the market,” Hill said. “We are in 13 markets, or MSAs, with exclusive health care system partners.”

Compass works with market intel our partners have prior to the partnership, and in most cases brings fresh insights to the table. From there we work together with our partners to plan and execute strategies to develop and grow ASCs in targeted markets. Because we are agile, we focus on tailoring our proven operating model for the greatest needs and opportunities in each market.

Essential Element #3: Think broadly and creatively about HOPD-to-ASC case migration.

Multiple factors are driving case migration from inpatient settings and into hospital outpatient settings and ASCs, Hill told Ambulatory Surgery Center News. For example, “Medicare has moved procedures off the hospital-only list and onto the ASC-approved list, allowing joints, shoulders, etc., to shift to outpatient settings,” he said, and “anesthesia has progressed to the point where big surgeries can happen on a same-day basis.”

“Technology in the OR has also advanced significantly, allowing us to do bigger cases with more precision,” Hill added, and COVID accelerated elective cases moving out of hospital settings.

When Compass collaborates with health systems to plan case migration, we look not only at rapidly growing ASC procedures in total joint, spine, and cardiovascular service lines, but also ophthalmology and gastroenterology that have been performed in ASCs for the past 20 or 30 years.  

“There’s a significant opportunity with eyes and GI procedural types,” Hill said. “With our hospital partners, there’s an opportunity to help them align with these specialties in an ASC setting.”

Essential Element #4: Understand that knowing and executing are two different things.

“We often see opportunities to turn around underperforming or breakeven centers,” Hill said. “People almost always know what to do — they struggle with how to do it.”

“In our company, we talk about how knowing the right answer is only half of what you need to be successful. The other half is executing it at the partnership level to get it implemented. That is the beauty and challenge of working in partnerships.”

Essential Element #5: Always remember that patient care is the cornerstone of our mission.

“Start with the baseline,” Hill said. “Important, complex clinical work happens in our centers every day ... We are doing surgery — people are unconscious, they’re cut open in pursuit of a better life.”

“We’re a mission-driven company” and our partnerships are mission-driven, Hill stressed. “Our purpose comes up in all sorts of ways every day, improving the lives of patients and providers.”

Read the article: Compass Surgical Partners CEO DJ Hill: Our Business Mandate Is Creating High-Performing Partnerships.

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