Cure What Ails Your Bottom Line: Inconsistent ED surgical coverage

If your facility is presenting any of the following four symptoms, it’s likely your trauma and acute-care surgery (TACS) operation is on life support. Your revenue is flat-lining and need some sort of an intervention to revive it.

1. 1. 1. Hospital leadership is struggling with ways to successfully grow revenues for your surgical program. Prognosis: A sagging bottom line that’s unsustainable.
      2. Your facility falls short of meeting American College of Surgeons-verified trauma center criteria that it is redirecting those patients to ACS-verified trauma centers. Prognosis: Business and revenue opportunities lost.
      3. You’re relying on local surgeons to provide emergency general surgical care — surgeons already busy with their own private practices. Prognosis: Stressed local physicians, care delayed, clinical outcomes potentially poorer, and business lost. Again.
      4. Patients are reporting dissatisfaction with overcrowded EDs, delayed procedures, disjointed follow-up and a lack of family communications. And they’re telling others. Prognosis: Bleak.

There’s no question the pandemic has caused a huge hit to most hospitals’ bottom line. Costs of providing care have shot up, qualified surgeons and professional staff are exhausted and in increasingly short supply, and many elective procedures are still being cancelled or postponed. As healthcare works to recover, no organization can afford to turn away badly needed and profitable business. That especially includes an efficient, effective TACS program, which typically generates critically needed revenue, contributes to high levels of organizational performance and fuels community goodwill, repeat patient, and positive name recognition.

To excel, your Emergency Department should be admitting at least 1% of total admissions as an acute care surgery case and achieve a CMI index greater than 2.09. It also should be achieving acceptable surgical patient lengths of stay, readmission, and complication rates. To do all that, it needs to deliver immediate care adhering to standardized best-practice guidelines, including exceptional post-surgical care coordination and communication across departments. Anything less will fall short of achieving your goals.

So what can you do to revive your TACS program, or take it to higher levels of performance? The first step is identifying what factors — your organization’s particular “symptoms”— are standing in the way of a return to strong financial health: a high-volume TACS cases, a CMI that’s 2.0 or greater, and shorter lengths of stay. The next step is to take action to treat them—a step where you might should consider a SAMGI surgicalist intervention.

SAMGI’s surgicalist solution

SAMGI (Surgical Affiliates Management Group) delivers a proven cure for these issues. We partner with hospitals to provide superior, evidence-based 24/7/365 always on-duty emergency surgical services that improve patient outcomes while optimizing hospital performance, efficiency and revenues. Peer-reviewed results published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons have demonstrated that our evidence-based, standardized care programs deliver long-term excellence in patient care and optimization of overall hospital performance by improving workflow, efficiency and patient outcomes.

Unlike locum tenens surgeons, locally based SAMGI surgicalists work on a team of surgical partners to deliver best-practice, evidence-based emergency general, orthopedic, urology, GI and neurosurgical patient care. They’re not temps or fill-ins. They’re full-time surgery teams whose sole focus is to enable emergency patients at emergency surgical staffed-challenged hospitals to undergo surgery without unnecessary delays. There’s no waiting for local surgeons or other issues requiring transfers to tertiary-care hospitals with accredited trauma services farther from home.

Click here to learn more about SMAGI and to discover the kind of ROI a SAMGI surgicalist program can deliver.