Erik Sunset – Three ASC Problems That Technology Solves | This Week in Surgery Centers
Here’s what to expect on this week’s episode. 🎙️
Every surgery center encounters a range of financial and operational challenges. The good news? Technology presents a promising solution to overcome these hurdles.
Erik Sunset, the VP of Marketing at DocBuddy, joins the show today to discuss how technology can effectively address the challenges many surgery centers face. In this insightful conversation, we explore the potential of technology to tackle three key issues: staffing, workflows, and revenue cycle management. Here’s a quick summary:
😃 Staffing Help: COVID-19 exacerbated the staffing issues in ASCs, making it even more crucial to leverage technology. Examples like automated patient calling technology and integrated #EHR systems can alleviate the burden on limited staff, allowing them to focus on exceptions and critical tasks.
🔄 Improved Workflows: By implementing #technology solutions that centralize and standardize processes, ASCs can eliminate time-consuming tasks like chasing voicemails, emails, and faxes. This boosts efficiency and improves the overall operation of ASCs.
👍 RCM Enhancements: Don’t be afraid to take a hard look at your #RCM processes that likely have delays built-in, precisely the time lag involved in the traditional dictation and transcription process for surgical procedures, which comes with potential delays and inefficiencies.
Find the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube to hear all the details.
Episode Transcript
0:00
welcome to this week in surgery centers if you’re in the ASC industry then
0:06
you’re in the right place every week we’ll start the episode off by sharing an interesting conversation we had with
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our featured guests and then we’ll close the episode by recapping the latest news impacting surgery centers we’re excited
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to share with you what we have so let’s get started and see what the industry’s been up to [Music]
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hi everyone here’s what you can expect on today’s episode Eric Sunset is the VP
0:33
of marketing at Doc buddy and today he joins me to talk through three ASC problems that technology can solve now
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of course there are many more than three but on this week’s episode we’ll be addressing how Tech can help you with
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Staffing workflows and revenue cycle management we also chatted through some
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EHR Hot Topics such as meaningful use government mandates and Technology adoption lags
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in our news recap we’ll cover certificate of need laws Ryan Reynolds live colonoscopy how culture can help to
1:07
combat labor issues and of course end the new segment with the positive story about an experimental drug that has
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shown to significantly slow progression of brain cancer hope everyone enjoys the episode and
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here’s what’s going on this week in surgery centers [Music]
1:28
hi Eric welcome to the show hey Erica thanks for having me I’m happy to be here great can you tell our listeners a
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little bit about yourself and your background please yeah you got it I’m I’m Eric Sunset I’m the VP of marketing
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and Biz Dev at Doc buddy and Doc Buddy’s headquartered in Denver Colorado but I
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am located in not so sunny today Miami Florida awesome and what were you doing
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before you got to Doc buddy yeah great question I am I’m a health I.T lifer at
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this point I actually got my starts in health I.T selling ehrs selling
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marketing managing EHR resellers eventually LED an acquisition of a reseller to a dallas-based EHR called
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aprima they were acquired by emds I went over to emds and then from there got into
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revenue cycle management with a group here in Miami and the opportunity to join doc buddy
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presented itself about two years ago and that’s an exciting change of pace for me
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electronic health records and revenue cycle Management Services are critical obviously to the operation of whatever
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type of healthcare organization you’re talking about but it’s not always that organizations
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favorite vendor for obvious reasons and we’ll get into that a little bit during our podcast today but it’s a it’s
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exciting to be able to Delight providers and their staffs now with Doc buddy yeah that’s awesome we are big fans of Doc
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buddy at HST so we’re really excited to have you on today to cover how technology can help solve three ASC
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problems obviously there are way more but today we’ll just cover three of the
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big ones so let’s jump in you got into Healthcare and health I.T as a
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meaningful use was rolled out what was it like to see that unfold yeah that was that was truly a wild ride
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we’ll set the table for your listeners here by going all the way back to 2009 when the high tech Act was that was
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rolled out that obviously had a meaningful use incentive and penalty tied to it I know a lot of our ASC
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listeners will be well I’ve been spared that that heartache of your first go-around with an ambulatory electronic
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health records since ASCS were not a part of that bill but going all the way back to 2009 if
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you believe it or not your mechanic would have had a better capability to tell you when you’re due for maintenance
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on your car then your physician would have for your annual wellness check software is really the only way that you
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can do that and despite the exorbitant costs of this program a lot of Spears
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being thrown at meaningfully use here there is some good we’re going to get there but despite 35 billion dollars that it costs the country despite our
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lack of true interoperability I hate to say it but just speaking the truth here
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and really despite some of the massive negative impact these ambulatory ehrs have had on physician satisfaction it
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was an absolutely necessary step for the country to bring us into the 21st century reality really of digital
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Healthcare so you end up with improved quality and safety for patients you get a data foundation for healthcare
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informatics to actually use then you get some other positives like better patient communication and transparency in your
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care through things like patient portals so through all that you’ll notice I didn’t mention the ASC at all and we’re
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talking about practices and hospitals really Logan already said the ASC space was spared this meaningfully use mandate
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just the way that the bill was written and there are certainly Technologies in
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place at ASCS but unfortunately the ASC seems to lag even in Greater regard to
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technology adoption than the peers that both practices and at the hospital so it’s just not to the full scale of
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adoption yet we have this debate internally all the
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time do you think that legislation is ever coming for ASCS to adopt an EHR
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I love the pontificate on that you got to think that there’s going to be something coming down the line only
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because so many procedures are coming off of that IPO list especially cardiologic type procedures going into
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the ASE so part of me is somewhat would be somewhat open to a push by the federal
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government to say hey we need some more technology here our CMS money is reimbursing for these procedures now as
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less and less or as more and more things come off the IPO and I think it’s something like 50 of all procedures are
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now being done in the ASC and I think as you start to get more and more Medicare money you’re reimbursing for those
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procedures it’ll probably become a hotter topic but on the other side of that the debate
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is that what did meaningful use really get you the end goal was interoperability but we don’t have that so we have a
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digital we have digitized Healthcare and we don’t necessarily have what we were promised so that’ll be an interesting
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debate makes me glad you know among many reasons that my job isn’t in Washington DC I have to fully vet that out but
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it’ll be very interesting to to watch where do you fall on that debate Erica yeah we it changes this time last year I
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would have told you no I know I don’t think it’s ever coming but in the CMS
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had recently asked ASCS how they feel about it and I just think asking that
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alone while it is a baby step it is a step I don’t know I don’t know I feel
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like they’re gonna go about it in a roundabout way like they’re never going to actually mandate it but it but to be
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able to do reporting quality metrics and all this stuff the only way to efficiently get to that would be to have
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any HR so whether they officially mandate it or just indirectly mandate it
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we’ll see yeah maybe you and I are better suited for a job on Capitol Hill with two kind
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of non-committal answers maybe yes maybe no but I think you raise a very important point that some of the
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efficiencies that you want to gain some of the reporting capability that a business like an ASU would want to have
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necessarily comes from technology like an EHR especially one like HST offers
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and when you look at some of the market forces surrounding ASCS considerate amounts of investment huge amounts of
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investment either by pe or other entities like Health Systems into their own ASE ecosystem I think there’s going
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to be more and more questions asked of ASE owner and operators about what’s going on underneath the hood that you
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really can’t answer without the right technology yep agreed
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all right we’re gonna have to put our political careers aside here let’s get back to some other topics so what are
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the biggest challenges we hear from our clients is of course around Staffing kovid obviously was devastating in terms
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of exacerbating and already existing issue and it’s obviously tough to deliver services or do anything if you
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don’t have the staff to facilitate it what is the connection between technology and Staffing
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yeah you hit the nail on the head covered was absolutely brutal for hiring and I’ll share a quick anecdote that a
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fairly large multi-location multi-physician Primary Care Group here in in Florida offers extremely
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competitive wages they offer benefits to their employees so going way above and
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beyond and HR sense and they just cannot hire a single soul
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to help them and we’re talking about Mission critical processes at this group where they just literally cannot make a
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hire despite doing everything they can and despite doing all the right things to attract great talent to their
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organization so I’m not one to tell you exactly why that is still happening covet is
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obviously a no-brainer why it happened through the pandemic but now that we’re kind of out the other side you just got
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people that are frantically working to fill positions but it’s just not happening so where you have the shortfall in labor
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and it’s a classic Healthcare fix right if you have a problem let’s just hire somebody we’ll just throw people at it
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until we don’t have a problem anymore and unfortunately that’s no longer an option maybe that wasn’t the right thing
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to do to begin with but when you have a labor shortage you have got to look
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outside of just hiring more ftes to fix the problem and that’s where technology can really help fill a gap like that and
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this is a really low hanging fruit example but the easiest one that I can give is with phone calls being made to
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confirm procedures with patients and there are absolutely ASCS taking advantage of services that automate this
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and remove this as a manual task from their list but for everyone that does in my estimation there’s probably two that
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don’t so with these ases where you’re still using labor to fulfill a really
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low operational requirement and by low operational requirements obviously important that people come in for their
10:40
appointment that’s not the low requirement but the ability to confirm that appointment
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uh your better option is very obviously you need to be using some type of automated patient calling technology
10:52
that integrates with your PM right because we’re talking about technology replacing a labor Gap or augmenting an
10:59
existing process that’s strictly manual you want to have as much benefit as you
11:04
can for your technology spend so Baseline would be something like an
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automated caller or texter probably text preferred these days people don’t like the the phone calls from random numbers
11:15
and then to take it to the next level being able to integrate that patient feedback into your PM really with the
11:22
goal of giving your staff giving your ftes the very least amount to do in one
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work area so what do I mean by that you want to be handling exceptions you don’t want people calling through your day list
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just because it’s there you want to be handling the outliers with technology pointing out hey this person had an
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issue with their appointment hey we need this form from this patient whatever that is you don’t want to be doing
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strictly manual tasks just because you can
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and I think you said it perfectly I would just wrote it down handling the exceptions is exactly what everybody
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your talented limited staff should be doing and to your point Aces and dirt
12:05
tough workflows whether they have adequate staff or not being able to help them out as much as you possibly can is
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huge yeah and we’ll take it into Point number two here we talked about technology
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being able to augment a limited Workforce and hopefully you’re not limited I’m obviously not rooting for
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that but the reality is most organizations across all industry are short-handed to some extent through this
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covid Oddity but the next item is that there are some processes that are absolutely critical
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to the operation of your surgery center but you’re doing something in a way that’s not standardized so put yourself
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in an ASC operator shoes for a moment think of all the ways that you’re
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receiving a surgery order is it by facts it’s by email and hopefully it’s an encrypted email and
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not just a Gmail or an Outlook obviously we’ve got Phi at stake or is it phone calls is it a carrier pigeon or smoke
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signals or all of the above so to take it a step further and I
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obviously give a somewhat silly example but do all the different practices that send you surgeries are they all sending
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you their procedures the same way and are all the surgeons at all those individual practices relaying that they
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want to schedule surgery with you the same way we’re delivering the point here but you can see how large ASC that handles a
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wide variety of procedures it can get complicated really quickly so we’ve already established since a fact you’re
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working with limited staff you can’t just throw people to track down all the different ways you get procedures I need
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you to check voicemail three times a day I need you to look in our surgery order email box 10 times a day or have it on
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your phone really the way you solve these non-standardized workflows has got to be
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with technology and not only standardize it but centralize it into one stream and full
14:00
credit to our ASC administrators operators and scheduling departments that can deal with all of the Clutter
14:06
but when you think about how the rest of Industry handles what’s very clearly a problem let me rephrase that what’s at
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best an inconvenience and at worst a significant problem where you’re having to chase whether it’s voicemails Post-it
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notes emails like we said whatever the case is the rest of Industry would not
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tolerate this and they’re absolutely ASCS that have it standardized and
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streamlined and they are a high performing ASC but again for everyone that is there are many more that are not
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so by using Tech to standardize and centralize this process you’re eliminating what amounts to just a pure
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cost for your staff’s time to be able to eventually get all these procedures
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scheduled and then to go one more step into the pain into The Hurt Locker of
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this what about all the forms that you need completed to actually go through with that procedure so you might be getting
15:02
requests for scheduling through the phone or picking up a voicemail or from
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a fax but then what about that patient’s H PS what about the consents what about a prior authorization what about all the
15:14
different things you actually need to have in place before you can even perform that proceed so as an ASE
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administrator as a listener of this week in surgery centers think about all of the ways that everything is a one-off or
15:28
is different than the next one that you’re going to get technology is how you resolve that waste
15:34
and I’ll call it what it is that waste of FTE time consolidating all of this down and then being able to communicate
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with the practices with which you work hey patient X who’s scheduled two weeks out from now we don’t have any of their
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forms can you send them to us in this one way we deem as the only way to get
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procedures onto our schedule yep and I think I know the answer to
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this but to clarify you’re not advocating that surgery centers should adopt Tech to reduce Staffing and head
16:04
count is
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no you’ve hopefully gotten to stop by the doc Woody booth at aska or your state ASC shows that nobody loves our
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ASC employees more than doc buddy and I think I can speak through HST there as well absolutely just for a quick example
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if you are in the very fortunate position as an ASC operator or manager
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or owner and you have enough staff you have adequate Staffing good for you the
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goal with technology at your ASC isn’t to go around and say you know what I can reduce head count by 20 if I adopt these
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few Technologies there will be edge cases and probably not in this post-covered world but there
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are potential for edge cases where maybe you are overstaffed but it’s a flashback
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to my revenue cycle management days the recommendation is not ever to reduce
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your head count just for the sake of it unless there’s a compelling reason or maybe an HR issue obviously we’re
17:06
speaking in generalities here what I would recommend is that if you do end up adopting a technology and
17:13
hopefully that technology saves you a ton of time and the recommendation there would be to get your employees that have
17:20
been I had their time reallocated to Tech or Tech is saving that time move them to something more meaningful
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and obviously the lowest hanging fruit there to use that phrase again is something like patient accounts
17:32
something that needs constant attention something that you need people to do automated patient accounts I can really
17:39
only get you so far so that’d be my number one place to look but again hopefully everybody who’s listening to
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their AR is low and it’s within 30 days and everything’s current but obviously that’s that’s not always
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the case yeah I know we’re always trying to toe that line too of making it clear yes
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technology can help save time and improve all these efficiencies but it really only works if you have buy-in
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from your staff and from the people who are going to be using it and truly understand the value and the ins and
18:08
outs and how it works having those super users so I completely agree
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yeah and that if I can step in you there that ties into one of the core tenets of management right like hopefully you’ve
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got a great culture where you bring a technology to the table and everybody’s ready to adopt and they see the value
18:25
but if you’re have ever been in any type of HR capacity you’ll know the most
18:31
expensive employee you’ll ever have is the one that you now have to replace so
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to be able to hang on to good work is just critical especially when you can’t really make a higher in 2023
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yeah for sure now you had mentioned revenue cycle management and that’s a
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great segue to our third problem that technology can solve for an ASC so tell
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me more about that one yeah this is a sneaky problem on our
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list of three here and it’s accepting that the status quo is good enough and
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sometimes part of your status quo is a technology or a service or maybe it’s not maybe it’s just a strictly manual
19:13
process for you right now but Erica would you believe that it is a
19:19
widely accepted and adopted practice that even in brand new state-of-the-art
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ASCS that are costing over thirty dollars per square foot to build you know at least 30 say
19:30
one of the most critical aspects of their operation which is their revenue cycle
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it’s utilizing a mechanism with a built-in lag a built-in time delay
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I’m obviously being dramatic I want to have something interesting to listen to obviously but that’s the truth and I’m
19:52
talking about the use of a transcription service to generate operative reports and this is one of those things that
19:59
it’s this is how we’ve always done it it works this is good enough for us and we don’t need to think about changing it
20:05
and any self-help or any motivational book you ever read or any management book for that respect if you’re settling
20:12
for the status quo because that’s how you’ve always done it you’re in trouble you may not know it you may not feel
20:18
like you’re in trouble but that is not a good reason to keep doing things the way that you’ve always done that
20:24
so to paint you a little bit more of a picture here’s what I’m talking about with the inherent lag so you’re a
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surgeon Dr Palmer you’ve just completed your procedure and now you’re either
20:35
going to do your dictation that then goes out to your transcription service or maybe you wait till the end of your
20:40
day to do all of your dictations at once either way example holds
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once those go out either procedure by procedure or all at once at the end of the day
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you’re going to wait some amount of time for your transcribed dictation to actually come back to you for your
20:57
review and hopefully it’s right and accurate and if it’s not you supply the edits and
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obviously there’s there’s a lot of discussion to be had around how long that takes how much are you paying for
21:08
the transcription service what’s your SLA so maybe it’s a couple days maybe it’s a couple weeks
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in any case you’re waiting and you’re potentially waiting again if you had any edits that needed to go into that
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operator and then finally once you get back a completed final version of your
21:25
operative report then you’re signing it and then it’s going to your billing team
21:31
so you’ve performed the procedure you’ve delivered a fantastic patient outcome now you’re waiting on average about 15
21:38
days to have a signed and final op reports and then and only then are you
21:44
really able to bill for that encounter so to me you know coming from the the seat that I’m sitting in obviously as a
21:51
technology person this is a highly unusual situation and the dynamic can get a little bit worse
21:58
I’m sure you hear a lot of the same things when you’re at events like ask or any of the state ASC shows but the
22:05
number one complaints and we’ve done some polling and some surveying on this but the number one complaint we hear
22:10
from ASC administrators and staff is that they’re waiting on signatures
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this is like 95 of the problems that are that we hear on the show for
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so you’re familiar with it yeah we hear that all the time
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okay and then to build up another dramatic example you know what if you’re
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not going to see that surgeon again for a week or two weeks or what if you only see that surgeon once a month and maybe
22:42
they’re on vacation this month that claims in trouble that claims in
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Jeopardy before it even has a chance to be filed and Jeopardy the timely filing obviously
22:52
so we talked earlier about the lag and Adoption of technology in general at the ASC
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and this is where I predict my own prediction here is that the most rapid change in ASC technology adoption is
23:06
going to come at the hands of the revenue cycle as we’ve talked a little bit about the reporting that really only technology
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can give you unless you’ve got a very complicated kanban board you’re filling up with Post-its and all types of notes
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on your break room to be able to say how many procedures how many of this type of procedure do we do in a month how many are we predicting to do next month
23:27
um and all the way down the line about where technology I think will penetrate more fully into the ASC is at
23:34
the hands of the revenue cycle than anywhere else then my guess will you’ll be able to see broader adoption of all
23:40
technology across the entire supply chain to the entire production line of the ASC as we go through time
23:48
beautiful thank you so just to recap our three problems technology is solving we
23:54
have Staffing we have more efficient workflows in general and then the sneaky
24:00
one helping to improve with revenue cycle management flows and reducing time to payment
24:07
exactly you hit the nail on the head that speed to revenue point is is often overlooked
24:13
just because that’s just been the gold standard for so long you may not know or your listeners may not know that the
24:19
technology and the service that underlies transcription as we know it it’s over 100 years old and it hasn’t
24:26
changed in that hundred years really at all except maybe now it’s on your smartphone sometimes but you’re still
24:31
waiting sure yeah that’s good context all right Eric one more question we do
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this every week with our guests what is one thing our listeners can do this week to improve their surgery centers
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oh what a good one to end with so we’ve talked about ways technology can improve
24:52
your surgery center and what I would do my recommendation to your listeners would be to list out the processes that
24:59
you’re managing manually something that you would call the old way something that isn’t technology enabled let’s be
25:06
clear not everything has to be technology enabled to be good but you end up with a process that you can control and manage much better with
25:12
technology so now that we’ve got that caveat out of the way list all of your processes you’re handling the old way
25:18
rank them in the order of the most painful to the least painful that could
25:24
be time that could be cost that could just be frustration with what it is that you’re doing now
25:29
and this may be a somewhat self-serving for both of us even Erica but it’s to start shopping once you’ve identified
25:36
the key areas or the number one issue that’s causing you pain at your ASC get
25:41
a cost benefit analysis together and start talking to vendors and the reason for that is that most
25:48
often than not anything that you can purchase off the shelf that’s commercially available will do better
25:53
for you than something that’s brewed from home you end up with much better support you end up with a community of
25:58
like-minded users to help you through that process and then as you rinse and repeat through that list of identifying
26:06
processes where it’s strictly manual or it’s the old way and being able to replace them with technology take that
26:13
to your board and say hey I think I’m on to something here we can save x amount of time per week or we’ll have this much
26:18
less waste if we look at technology perfect
26:24
all right Eric we appreciate all of your Insight and thanks for coming on today
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as always it has been a busy week in healthcare so let’s Jump Right In according to an article in Becker’s ASC
26:40
certificate of need laws are likely to change in certain States so in case you’re not familiar a
26:47
certificate of need Law requires Health Care Providers which includes ASCS to
26:52
receive permission to build new facilities but the certificate of need approval
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process is lengthy and costly and difficult for many independent
27:03
Physicians especially small ASCS to try to tackle and as you can imagine the law
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differs in every state and in some states it doesn’t even exist the impact
27:15
of the law though is pretty clear in States where there’s no certificate of
27:20
need like Texas there are 450 plus Medicare certified ases and they are
27:26
thriving and continuing to grow and then in other states specifically like in the
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Northeast growth is slow and complicated and can really be a headache
27:37
now the Carolinas have been a focus recently because North Carolina is in a
27:42
tough spot they have recently been experiencing High economic and population growth but they also have
27:49
very strict certificate of need laws so a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the law but the state’s
27:56
court of appeals unanimously voted to dismiss the lawsuit unfortunately now I
28:02
think this one lawsuit failed because the surgeon argued it violated his constitutional rights which maybe just
28:09
wasn’t the right angle to take because there was one judge who agreed with him
28:15
but still voted to dismiss the case but as a very tiny baby step during
28:21
North Carolina Senate proposed its budget for the next two fiscal years with a provision that would allow single
28:28
specialty ASCS to convert to multi-specialty ases without going
28:33
through the certificate of need process so there’s at least that and down in South Carolina they passed a
28:41
bill that removed certificate of need requirements for new ASCS but the ASC
28:47
must provide charity care after being in operation for two years
28:52
so all of that to say it does look like the certificate of need laws are beginning to unravel in a lot of states
28:59
which will be critical for the industry’s growth and for lowering health care costs
29:06
in our Second Story outpatient surgery magazine is sharing what GI centers can
29:11
learn from Ryan Reynolds live colonoscopy so if you’re not familiar about eight
29:17
months ago Blake Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds lost a bet to his business partner and friend Robert mcelhenney
29:25
who you likely know from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and had to have a
29:30
public colonoscopy while it seems silly Ryan’s doctor did find and remove a potentially
29:37
pre-cancerous polyp while Rob’s Doctor Who did ultimately agree to have the
29:42
colonoscopy as well even though he won the BET removed three polyps the video of the process that they put
29:50
together in the procedure is on YouTube I’ll link to it in the show notes it currently has over 1.2 million views in
29:58
counting but in terms of the impact that it had online booking platform ZocDoc reported
30:06
a 36 percent increase in Daily colonoscopy bookings after the video
30:11
launched social media posts talking about colonoscopy increased by
30:17
244 and Google searches for colonoscopy and colon cancer Rose by 129 and 113
30:25
percent so while your ASC likely does not have the budget to hire celebrity ambassadors
30:32
this is a reminder that you shouldn’t be afraid to get creative and fun and ultimately connect with your patients in
30:39
a way that works for them in our third story The June July issue
30:45
of ASC Focus came out and there are some really great articles in there the one I
30:50
wanted to share today is about how ases can leverage culture to combat labor
30:56
issues now it might seem difficult to prioritize something like culture
31:02
building when your ASC is being faced with so many financial and operational challenges but they share that this is
31:09
actually the perfect time as your culture is the framework that will help you decide which team members are
31:15
essential and potentially worthy of a raise which contract nurses should be asked to
31:20
come on full time in which new interviewees you should hire and to back that up in a survey by
31:29
Glassdoor 73 of respondents said they would not take the step to even apply
31:34
for a position unless the company’s values aligned with their own meaning
31:40
that culture is key to recruiting and retention so where do you begin
31:45
you should be able to identify your company culture in one to two sentences and make sure your entire team can do
31:52
the same and is also thinking about the same values attitudes and habits
31:57
but to get to that point where you can create the culture you really need to ask for input from your employees how
32:04
would they describe the current culture what needs work and really this only works if you genuinely listen without
32:10
interruption and with an open mind then you can leverage that culture in
32:16
your job description and interviews to make sure you’re attracting the right talent and make sure you’re finding the
32:21
perfect candidate for the job again going back to that that Glassdoor survey it’s not that people are applying and
32:29
they’re not going to be a good fit at your culture at your company it’s that they’re not even going to take the step
32:35
to apply in the first place if they don’t understand and align with your company’s culture so just want to
32:41
reiterate putting it in that job description is key and the last thing they shared which I
32:46
Love Culture is not static it will change as the world evolves and as your leadership and staff change so make sure
32:53
you’re using it as a tool for growth and don’t just set it and forget it
32:59
and to end our new segment on a positive note an experimental drug has shown to
33:05
significantly slow progression of brain cancer a new study found the
33:10
experimental drug voracidinib significantly reduce the progression of
33:15
brain cancer slowing the progression of tumors by an average of more than 16 months for acid inib specifically works
33:23
on grade 2 gliomas by blocking a specific enzyme mutated in low-grade
33:28
gliomas keeping them from progressing and postponing the need for further treatment like chemo
33:34
and according to Wake Forest Baptist Health Dr Glenn lesser the results are
33:40
quite striking and they’re statistically highly significant and more importantly they’re clinically very significant
33:48
the surveyor group is working to get the drug approved by the FDA for use in the
33:53
U.S and that news story officially wraps up this week’s podcast thank you as always
34:00
for spending a few minutes of your time with us make sure to subscribe or leave a review on whichever platform you’re
34:07
listening from I hope you have a great day and we will see you again next week foreign
34:17
[Music]
welcome to this week in surgery centers if you’re in the ASC industry then
0:06
you’re in the right place every week we’ll start the episode off by sharing an interesting conversation we had with
0:11
our featured guests and then we’ll close the episode by recapping the latest news impacting surgery centers we’re excited
0:18
to share with you what we have so let’s get started and see what the industry’s been up to [Music]
0:27
hi everyone here’s what you can expect on today’s episode Eric Sunset is the VP
0:33
of marketing at Doc buddy and today he joins me to talk through three ASC problems that technology can solve now
0:41
of course there are many more than three but on this week’s episode we’ll be addressing how Tech can help you with
0:47
Staffing workflows and revenue cycle management we also chatted through some
0:52
EHR Hot Topics such as meaningful use government mandates and Technology adoption lags
0:59
in our news recap we’ll cover certificate of need laws Ryan Reynolds live colonoscopy how culture can help to
1:07
combat labor issues and of course end the new segment with the positive story about an experimental drug that has
1:14
shown to significantly slow progression of brain cancer hope everyone enjoys the episode and
1:21
here’s what’s going on this week in surgery centers [Music]
1:28
hi Eric welcome to the show hey Erica thanks for having me I’m happy to be here great can you tell our listeners a
1:36
little bit about yourself and your background please yeah you got it I’m I’m Eric Sunset I’m the VP of marketing
1:42
and Biz Dev at Doc buddy and Doc Buddy’s headquartered in Denver Colorado but I
1:47
am located in not so sunny today Miami Florida awesome and what were you doing
1:53
before you got to Doc buddy yeah great question I am I’m a health I.T lifer at
1:58
this point I actually got my starts in health I.T selling ehrs selling
2:05
marketing managing EHR resellers eventually LED an acquisition of a reseller to a dallas-based EHR called
2:12
aprima they were acquired by emds I went over to emds and then from there got into
2:17
revenue cycle management with a group here in Miami and the opportunity to join doc buddy
2:24
presented itself about two years ago and that’s an exciting change of pace for me
2:30
electronic health records and revenue cycle Management Services are critical obviously to the operation of whatever
2:37
type of healthcare organization you’re talking about but it’s not always that organizations
2:42
favorite vendor for obvious reasons and we’ll get into that a little bit during our podcast today but it’s a it’s
2:48
exciting to be able to Delight providers and their staffs now with Doc buddy yeah that’s awesome we are big fans of Doc
2:56
buddy at HST so we’re really excited to have you on today to cover how technology can help solve three ASC
3:03
problems obviously there are way more but today we’ll just cover three of the
3:08
big ones so let’s jump in you got into Healthcare and health I.T as a
3:13
meaningful use was rolled out what was it like to see that unfold yeah that was that was truly a wild ride
3:21
we’ll set the table for your listeners here by going all the way back to 2009 when the high tech Act was that was
3:28
rolled out that obviously had a meaningful use incentive and penalty tied to it I know a lot of our ASC
3:36
listeners will be well I’ve been spared that that heartache of your first go-around with an ambulatory electronic
3:43
health records since ASCS were not a part of that bill but going all the way back to 2009 if
3:50
you believe it or not your mechanic would have had a better capability to tell you when you’re due for maintenance
3:55
on your car then your physician would have for your annual wellness check software is really the only way that you
4:01
can do that and despite the exorbitant costs of this program a lot of Spears
4:07
being thrown at meaningfully use here there is some good we’re going to get there but despite 35 billion dollars that it costs the country despite our
4:15
lack of true interoperability I hate to say it but just speaking the truth here
4:20
and really despite some of the massive negative impact these ambulatory ehrs have had on physician satisfaction it
4:27
was an absolutely necessary step for the country to bring us into the 21st century reality really of digital
4:34
Healthcare so you end up with improved quality and safety for patients you get a data foundation for healthcare
4:40
informatics to actually use then you get some other positives like better patient communication and transparency in your
4:47
care through things like patient portals so through all that you’ll notice I didn’t mention the ASC at all and we’re
4:55
talking about practices and hospitals really Logan already said the ASC space was spared this meaningfully use mandate
5:01
just the way that the bill was written and there are certainly Technologies in
5:07
place at ASCS but unfortunately the ASC seems to lag even in Greater regard to
5:13
technology adoption than the peers that both practices and at the hospital so it’s just not to the full scale of
5:19
adoption yet we have this debate internally all the
5:25
time do you think that legislation is ever coming for ASCS to adopt an EHR
5:31
I love the pontificate on that you got to think that there’s going to be something coming down the line only
5:38
because so many procedures are coming off of that IPO list especially cardiologic type procedures going into
5:45
the ASE so part of me is somewhat would be somewhat open to a push by the federal
5:52
government to say hey we need some more technology here our CMS money is reimbursing for these procedures now as
5:58
less and less or as more and more things come off the IPO and I think it’s something like 50 of all procedures are
6:04
now being done in the ASC and I think as you start to get more and more Medicare money you’re reimbursing for those
6:10
procedures it’ll probably become a hotter topic but on the other side of that the debate
6:17
is that what did meaningful use really get you the end goal was interoperability but we don’t have that so we have a
6:25
digital we have digitized Healthcare and we don’t necessarily have what we were promised so that’ll be an interesting
6:31
debate makes me glad you know among many reasons that my job isn’t in Washington DC I have to fully vet that out but
6:40
it’ll be very interesting to to watch where do you fall on that debate Erica yeah we it changes this time last year I
6:48
would have told you no I know I don’t think it’s ever coming but in the CMS
6:53
had recently asked ASCS how they feel about it and I just think asking that
7:00
alone while it is a baby step it is a step I don’t know I don’t know I feel
7:06
like they’re gonna go about it in a roundabout way like they’re never going to actually mandate it but it but to be
7:11
able to do reporting quality metrics and all this stuff the only way to efficiently get to that would be to have
7:18
any HR so whether they officially mandate it or just indirectly mandate it
7:24
we’ll see yeah maybe you and I are better suited for a job on Capitol Hill with two kind
7:31
of non-committal answers maybe yes maybe no but I think you raise a very important point that some of the
7:38
efficiencies that you want to gain some of the reporting capability that a business like an ASU would want to have
7:44
necessarily comes from technology like an EHR especially one like HST offers
7:49
and when you look at some of the market forces surrounding ASCS considerate amounts of investment huge amounts of
7:56
investment either by pe or other entities like Health Systems into their own ASE ecosystem I think there’s going
8:03
to be more and more questions asked of ASE owner and operators about what’s going on underneath the hood that you
8:09
really can’t answer without the right technology yep agreed
8:15
all right we’re gonna have to put our political careers aside here let’s get back to some other topics so what are
8:22
the biggest challenges we hear from our clients is of course around Staffing kovid obviously was devastating in terms
8:29
of exacerbating and already existing issue and it’s obviously tough to deliver services or do anything if you
8:36
don’t have the staff to facilitate it what is the connection between technology and Staffing
8:42
yeah you hit the nail on the head covered was absolutely brutal for hiring and I’ll share a quick anecdote that a
8:49
fairly large multi-location multi-physician Primary Care Group here in in Florida offers extremely
8:57
competitive wages they offer benefits to their employees so going way above and
9:02
beyond and HR sense and they just cannot hire a single soul
9:08
to help them and we’re talking about Mission critical processes at this group where they just literally cannot make a
9:15
hire despite doing everything they can and despite doing all the right things to attract great talent to their
9:21
organization so I’m not one to tell you exactly why that is still happening covet is
9:27
obviously a no-brainer why it happened through the pandemic but now that we’re kind of out the other side you just got
9:32
people that are frantically working to fill positions but it’s just not happening so where you have the shortfall in labor
9:41
and it’s a classic Healthcare fix right if you have a problem let’s just hire somebody we’ll just throw people at it
9:47
until we don’t have a problem anymore and unfortunately that’s no longer an option maybe that wasn’t the right thing
9:54
to do to begin with but when you have a labor shortage you have got to look
9:59
outside of just hiring more ftes to fix the problem and that’s where technology can really help fill a gap like that and
10:06
this is a really low hanging fruit example but the easiest one that I can give is with phone calls being made to
10:13
confirm procedures with patients and there are absolutely ASCS taking advantage of services that automate this
10:21
and remove this as a manual task from their list but for everyone that does in my estimation there’s probably two that
10:27
don’t so with these ases where you’re still using labor to fulfill a really
10:34
low operational requirement and by low operational requirements obviously important that people come in for their
10:40
appointment that’s not the low requirement but the ability to confirm that appointment
10:45
uh your better option is very obviously you need to be using some type of automated patient calling technology
10:52
that integrates with your PM right because we’re talking about technology replacing a labor Gap or augmenting an
10:59
existing process that’s strictly manual you want to have as much benefit as you
11:04
can for your technology spend so Baseline would be something like an
11:09
automated caller or texter probably text preferred these days people don’t like the the phone calls from random numbers
11:15
and then to take it to the next level being able to integrate that patient feedback into your PM really with the
11:22
goal of giving your staff giving your ftes the very least amount to do in one
11:28
work area so what do I mean by that you want to be handling exceptions you don’t want people calling through your day list
11:34
just because it’s there you want to be handling the outliers with technology pointing out hey this person had an
11:40
issue with their appointment hey we need this form from this patient whatever that is you don’t want to be doing
11:46
strictly manual tasks just because you can
11:52
and I think you said it perfectly I would just wrote it down handling the exceptions is exactly what everybody
11:58
your talented limited staff should be doing and to your point Aces and dirt
12:05
tough workflows whether they have adequate staff or not being able to help them out as much as you possibly can is
12:11
huge yeah and we’ll take it into Point number two here we talked about technology
12:18
being able to augment a limited Workforce and hopefully you’re not limited I’m obviously not rooting for
12:23
that but the reality is most organizations across all industry are short-handed to some extent through this
12:29
covid Oddity but the next item is that there are some processes that are absolutely critical
12:36
to the operation of your surgery center but you’re doing something in a way that’s not standardized so put yourself
12:44
in an ASC operator shoes for a moment think of all the ways that you’re
12:50
receiving a surgery order is it by facts it’s by email and hopefully it’s an encrypted email and
12:56
not just a Gmail or an Outlook obviously we’ve got Phi at stake or is it phone calls is it a carrier pigeon or smoke
13:03
signals or all of the above so to take it a step further and I
13:08
obviously give a somewhat silly example but do all the different practices that send you surgeries are they all sending
13:15
you their procedures the same way and are all the surgeons at all those individual practices relaying that they
13:21
want to schedule surgery with you the same way we’re delivering the point here but you can see how large ASC that handles a
13:29
wide variety of procedures it can get complicated really quickly so we’ve already established since a fact you’re
13:35
working with limited staff you can’t just throw people to track down all the different ways you get procedures I need
13:41
you to check voicemail three times a day I need you to look in our surgery order email box 10 times a day or have it on
13:47
your phone really the way you solve these non-standardized workflows has got to be
13:53
with technology and not only standardize it but centralize it into one stream and full
14:00
credit to our ASC administrators operators and scheduling departments that can deal with all of the Clutter
14:06
but when you think about how the rest of Industry handles what’s very clearly a problem let me rephrase that what’s at
14:14
best an inconvenience and at worst a significant problem where you’re having to chase whether it’s voicemails Post-it
14:21
notes emails like we said whatever the case is the rest of Industry would not
14:26
tolerate this and they’re absolutely ASCS that have it standardized and
14:32
streamlined and they are a high performing ASC but again for everyone that is there are many more that are not
14:38
so by using Tech to standardize and centralize this process you’re eliminating what amounts to just a pure
14:44
cost for your staff’s time to be able to eventually get all these procedures
14:49
scheduled and then to go one more step into the pain into The Hurt Locker of
14:54
this what about all the forms that you need completed to actually go through with that procedure so you might be getting
15:02
requests for scheduling through the phone or picking up a voicemail or from
15:07
a fax but then what about that patient’s H PS what about the consents what about a prior authorization what about all the
15:14
different things you actually need to have in place before you can even perform that proceed so as an ASE
15:20
administrator as a listener of this week in surgery centers think about all of the ways that everything is a one-off or
15:28
is different than the next one that you’re going to get technology is how you resolve that waste
15:34
and I’ll call it what it is that waste of FTE time consolidating all of this down and then being able to communicate
15:41
with the practices with which you work hey patient X who’s scheduled two weeks out from now we don’t have any of their
15:46
forms can you send them to us in this one way we deem as the only way to get
15:52
procedures onto our schedule yep and I think I know the answer to
15:58
this but to clarify you’re not advocating that surgery centers should adopt Tech to reduce Staffing and head
16:04
count is
16:11
no you’ve hopefully gotten to stop by the doc Woody booth at aska or your state ASC shows that nobody loves our
16:19
ASC employees more than doc buddy and I think I can speak through HST there as well absolutely just for a quick example
16:25
if you are in the very fortunate position as an ASC operator or manager
16:31
or owner and you have enough staff you have adequate Staffing good for you the
16:37
goal with technology at your ASC isn’t to go around and say you know what I can reduce head count by 20 if I adopt these
16:44
few Technologies there will be edge cases and probably not in this post-covered world but there
16:50
are potential for edge cases where maybe you are overstaffed but it’s a flashback
16:55
to my revenue cycle management days the recommendation is not ever to reduce
17:01
your head count just for the sake of it unless there’s a compelling reason or maybe an HR issue obviously we’re
17:06
speaking in generalities here what I would recommend is that if you do end up adopting a technology and
17:13
hopefully that technology saves you a ton of time and the recommendation there would be to get your employees that have
17:20
been I had their time reallocated to Tech or Tech is saving that time move them to something more meaningful
17:27
and obviously the lowest hanging fruit there to use that phrase again is something like patient accounts
17:32
something that needs constant attention something that you need people to do automated patient accounts I can really
17:39
only get you so far so that’d be my number one place to look but again hopefully everybody who’s listening to
17:44
their AR is low and it’s within 30 days and everything’s current but obviously that’s that’s not always
17:51
the case yeah I know we’re always trying to toe that line too of making it clear yes
17:57
technology can help save time and improve all these efficiencies but it really only works if you have buy-in
18:03
from your staff and from the people who are going to be using it and truly understand the value and the ins and
18:08
outs and how it works having those super users so I completely agree
18:13
yeah and that if I can step in you there that ties into one of the core tenets of management right like hopefully you’ve
18:19
got a great culture where you bring a technology to the table and everybody’s ready to adopt and they see the value
18:25
but if you’re have ever been in any type of HR capacity you’ll know the most
18:31
expensive employee you’ll ever have is the one that you now have to replace so
18:36
to be able to hang on to good work is just critical especially when you can’t really make a higher in 2023
18:42
yeah for sure now you had mentioned revenue cycle management and that’s a
18:48
great segue to our third problem that technology can solve for an ASC so tell
18:54
me more about that one yeah this is a sneaky problem on our
19:00
list of three here and it’s accepting that the status quo is good enough and
19:06
sometimes part of your status quo is a technology or a service or maybe it’s not maybe it’s just a strictly manual
19:13
process for you right now but Erica would you believe that it is a
19:19
widely accepted and adopted practice that even in brand new state-of-the-art
19:24
ASCS that are costing over thirty dollars per square foot to build you know at least 30 say
19:30
one of the most critical aspects of their operation which is their revenue cycle
19:36
it’s utilizing a mechanism with a built-in lag a built-in time delay
19:46
I’m obviously being dramatic I want to have something interesting to listen to obviously but that’s the truth and I’m
19:52
talking about the use of a transcription service to generate operative reports and this is one of those things that
19:59
it’s this is how we’ve always done it it works this is good enough for us and we don’t need to think about changing it
20:05
and any self-help or any motivational book you ever read or any management book for that respect if you’re settling
20:12
for the status quo because that’s how you’ve always done it you’re in trouble you may not know it you may not feel
20:18
like you’re in trouble but that is not a good reason to keep doing things the way that you’ve always done that
20:24
so to paint you a little bit more of a picture here’s what I’m talking about with the inherent lag so you’re a
20:30
surgeon Dr Palmer you’ve just completed your procedure and now you’re either
20:35
going to do your dictation that then goes out to your transcription service or maybe you wait till the end of your
20:40
day to do all of your dictations at once either way example holds
20:46
once those go out either procedure by procedure or all at once at the end of the day
20:51
you’re going to wait some amount of time for your transcribed dictation to actually come back to you for your
20:57
review and hopefully it’s right and accurate and if it’s not you supply the edits and
21:03
obviously there’s there’s a lot of discussion to be had around how long that takes how much are you paying for
21:08
the transcription service what’s your SLA so maybe it’s a couple days maybe it’s a couple weeks
21:13
in any case you’re waiting and you’re potentially waiting again if you had any edits that needed to go into that
21:20
operator and then finally once you get back a completed final version of your
21:25
operative report then you’re signing it and then it’s going to your billing team
21:31
so you’ve performed the procedure you’ve delivered a fantastic patient outcome now you’re waiting on average about 15
21:38
days to have a signed and final op reports and then and only then are you
21:44
really able to bill for that encounter so to me you know coming from the the seat that I’m sitting in obviously as a
21:51
technology person this is a highly unusual situation and the dynamic can get a little bit worse
21:58
I’m sure you hear a lot of the same things when you’re at events like ask or any of the state ASC shows but the
22:05
number one complaints and we’ve done some polling and some surveying on this but the number one complaint we hear
22:10
from ASC administrators and staff is that they’re waiting on signatures
22:16
this is like 95 of the problems that are that we hear on the show for
22:21
so you’re familiar with it yeah we hear that all the time
22:28
okay and then to build up another dramatic example you know what if you’re
22:35
not going to see that surgeon again for a week or two weeks or what if you only see that surgeon once a month and maybe
22:42
they’re on vacation this month that claims in trouble that claims in
22:47
Jeopardy before it even has a chance to be filed and Jeopardy the timely filing obviously
22:52
so we talked earlier about the lag and Adoption of technology in general at the ASC
22:58
and this is where I predict my own prediction here is that the most rapid change in ASC technology adoption is
23:06
going to come at the hands of the revenue cycle as we’ve talked a little bit about the reporting that really only technology
23:12
can give you unless you’ve got a very complicated kanban board you’re filling up with Post-its and all types of notes
23:20
on your break room to be able to say how many procedures how many of this type of procedure do we do in a month how many are we predicting to do next month
23:27
um and all the way down the line about where technology I think will penetrate more fully into the ASC is at
23:34
the hands of the revenue cycle than anywhere else then my guess will you’ll be able to see broader adoption of all
23:40
technology across the entire supply chain to the entire production line of the ASC as we go through time
23:48
beautiful thank you so just to recap our three problems technology is solving we
23:54
have Staffing we have more efficient workflows in general and then the sneaky
24:00
one helping to improve with revenue cycle management flows and reducing time to payment
24:07
exactly you hit the nail on the head that speed to revenue point is is often overlooked
24:13
just because that’s just been the gold standard for so long you may not know or your listeners may not know that the
24:19
technology and the service that underlies transcription as we know it it’s over 100 years old and it hasn’t
24:26
changed in that hundred years really at all except maybe now it’s on your smartphone sometimes but you’re still
24:31
waiting sure yeah that’s good context all right Eric one more question we do
24:38
this every week with our guests what is one thing our listeners can do this week to improve their surgery centers
24:46
oh what a good one to end with so we’ve talked about ways technology can improve
24:52
your surgery center and what I would do my recommendation to your listeners would be to list out the processes that
24:59
you’re managing manually something that you would call the old way something that isn’t technology enabled let’s be
25:06
clear not everything has to be technology enabled to be good but you end up with a process that you can control and manage much better with
25:12
technology so now that we’ve got that caveat out of the way list all of your processes you’re handling the old way
25:18
rank them in the order of the most painful to the least painful that could
25:24
be time that could be cost that could just be frustration with what it is that you’re doing now
25:29
and this may be a somewhat self-serving for both of us even Erica but it’s to start shopping once you’ve identified
25:36
the key areas or the number one issue that’s causing you pain at your ASC get
25:41
a cost benefit analysis together and start talking to vendors and the reason for that is that most
25:48
often than not anything that you can purchase off the shelf that’s commercially available will do better
25:53
for you than something that’s brewed from home you end up with much better support you end up with a community of
25:58
like-minded users to help you through that process and then as you rinse and repeat through that list of identifying
26:06
processes where it’s strictly manual or it’s the old way and being able to replace them with technology take that
26:13
to your board and say hey I think I’m on to something here we can save x amount of time per week or we’ll have this much
26:18
less waste if we look at technology perfect
26:24
all right Eric we appreciate all of your Insight and thanks for coming on today
26:32
as always it has been a busy week in healthcare so let’s Jump Right In according to an article in Becker’s ASC
26:40
certificate of need laws are likely to change in certain States so in case you’re not familiar a
26:47
certificate of need Law requires Health Care Providers which includes ASCS to
26:52
receive permission to build new facilities but the certificate of need approval
26:58
process is lengthy and costly and difficult for many independent
27:03
Physicians especially small ASCS to try to tackle and as you can imagine the law
27:09
differs in every state and in some states it doesn’t even exist the impact
27:15
of the law though is pretty clear in States where there’s no certificate of
27:20
need like Texas there are 450 plus Medicare certified ases and they are
27:26
thriving and continuing to grow and then in other states specifically like in the
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Northeast growth is slow and complicated and can really be a headache
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now the Carolinas have been a focus recently because North Carolina is in a
27:42
tough spot they have recently been experiencing High economic and population growth but they also have
27:49
very strict certificate of need laws so a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the law but the state’s
27:56
court of appeals unanimously voted to dismiss the lawsuit unfortunately now I
28:02
think this one lawsuit failed because the surgeon argued it violated his constitutional rights which maybe just
28:09
wasn’t the right angle to take because there was one judge who agreed with him
28:15
but still voted to dismiss the case but as a very tiny baby step during
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North Carolina Senate proposed its budget for the next two fiscal years with a provision that would allow single
28:28
specialty ASCS to convert to multi-specialty ases without going
28:33
through the certificate of need process so there’s at least that and down in South Carolina they passed a
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bill that removed certificate of need requirements for new ASCS but the ASC
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must provide charity care after being in operation for two years
28:52
so all of that to say it does look like the certificate of need laws are beginning to unravel in a lot of states
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which will be critical for the industry’s growth and for lowering health care costs
29:06
in our Second Story outpatient surgery magazine is sharing what GI centers can
29:11
learn from Ryan Reynolds live colonoscopy so if you’re not familiar about eight
29:17
months ago Blake Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds lost a bet to his business partner and friend Robert mcelhenney
29:25
who you likely know from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and had to have a
29:30
public colonoscopy while it seems silly Ryan’s doctor did find and remove a potentially
29:37
pre-cancerous polyp while Rob’s Doctor Who did ultimately agree to have the
29:42
colonoscopy as well even though he won the BET removed three polyps the video of the process that they put
29:50
together in the procedure is on YouTube I’ll link to it in the show notes it currently has over 1.2 million views in
29:58
counting but in terms of the impact that it had online booking platform ZocDoc reported
30:06
a 36 percent increase in Daily colonoscopy bookings after the video
30:11
launched social media posts talking about colonoscopy increased by
30:17
244 and Google searches for colonoscopy and colon cancer Rose by 129 and 113
30:25
percent so while your ASC likely does not have the budget to hire celebrity ambassadors
30:32
this is a reminder that you shouldn’t be afraid to get creative and fun and ultimately connect with your patients in
30:39
a way that works for them in our third story The June July issue
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of ASC Focus came out and there are some really great articles in there the one I
30:50
wanted to share today is about how ases can leverage culture to combat labor
30:56
issues now it might seem difficult to prioritize something like culture
31:02
building when your ASC is being faced with so many financial and operational challenges but they share that this is
31:09
actually the perfect time as your culture is the framework that will help you decide which team members are
31:15
essential and potentially worthy of a raise which contract nurses should be asked to
31:20
come on full time in which new interviewees you should hire and to back that up in a survey by
31:29
Glassdoor 73 of respondents said they would not take the step to even apply
31:34
for a position unless the company’s values aligned with their own meaning
31:40
that culture is key to recruiting and retention so where do you begin
31:45
you should be able to identify your company culture in one to two sentences and make sure your entire team can do
31:52
the same and is also thinking about the same values attitudes and habits
31:57
but to get to that point where you can create the culture you really need to ask for input from your employees how
32:04
would they describe the current culture what needs work and really this only works if you genuinely listen without
32:10
interruption and with an open mind then you can leverage that culture in
32:16
your job description and interviews to make sure you’re attracting the right talent and make sure you’re finding the
32:21
perfect candidate for the job again going back to that that Glassdoor survey it’s not that people are applying and
32:29
they’re not going to be a good fit at your culture at your company it’s that they’re not even going to take the step
32:35
to apply in the first place if they don’t understand and align with your company’s culture so just want to
32:41
reiterate putting it in that job description is key and the last thing they shared which I
32:46
Love Culture is not static it will change as the world evolves and as your leadership and staff change so make sure
32:53
you’re using it as a tool for growth and don’t just set it and forget it
32:59
and to end our new segment on a positive note an experimental drug has shown to
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significantly slow progression of brain cancer a new study found the
33:10
experimental drug voracidinib significantly reduce the progression of
33:15
brain cancer slowing the progression of tumors by an average of more than 16 months for acid inib specifically works
33:23
on grade 2 gliomas by blocking a specific enzyme mutated in low-grade
33:28
gliomas keeping them from progressing and postponing the need for further treatment like chemo
33:34
and according to Wake Forest Baptist Health Dr Glenn lesser the results are
33:40
quite striking and they’re statistically highly significant and more importantly they’re clinically very significant
33:48
the surveyor group is working to get the drug approved by the FDA for use in the
33:53
U.S and that news story officially wraps up this week’s podcast thank you as always
34:00
for spending a few minutes of your time with us make sure to subscribe or leave a review on whichever platform you’re
34:07
listening from I hope you have a great day and we will see you again next week foreign
34:17
[Music]
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