This Week in Surgery Centers: Gregory DeConciliis – Expanding Your ASC: From Concept to Completion

Gregory DeConciliis – Expanding Your ASC: From Concept to Completion

Here’s what to expect on this week’s episode. 🎙️

The second part of our three-part series on “Expanding Your ASC” dropped today! 

Our first episode covered bringing on new surgeons and new specialties. Bruce Johnstone, Principal at Apex, joins us to cover how to add a new OR to your existing facility. Here are seven highlights from our discussion.

1️⃣️ Assess Demand: Utilize data to understand your current OR utilization. Anything above 80-85% indicates potential need. 

2️⃣ Analyze Market: Look at population demographics and competition to gauge demand. 

3️⃣ Stakeholder Input: Gather feedback from surgeons, staff, and even patients. 

4️⃣ Cost Insights: Adding an OR can range from $500K to $1M, covering construction, equipment, and operational costs. 

5️⃣ Compliance & Regulations: Ensure you meet federal (CMS, HIPAA) and state regulations to avoid costly delays. 

6️⃣ Efficient Design: Create functional zones, incorporate advanced technology for better visualization and automation, and design with future expansion in mind. 

7️⃣ Managing Construction: Detailed planning and regular communication are key, consider temporary solutions to maintain safety, and keep patients informed to minimize anxiety. 

Check out the full episode on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform!  

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to this week in Surgery Centers. If you are in the ASC industry, then you are in the right place every week. We’ll start the episode off by sharing an interesting conversation we had with our featured guest, and then we’ll close the episode by recapping the latest news impacting surgery centers.

We’re excited to share with you what we have, so let’s get started and see what the industry’s been up to.

Erica: Hi everyone. Here’s what you can expect on today’s episode. Today is the third and final part of our three episode series on expanding your ASC. We’ve covered how to bring on new physicians, how to add new specialties, how to add a new operating room. And today I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg DeConcilius to talk with him about the expansion project he’s actively working on. Greg’s team realized a few years ago that they had outgrown their current 3OR facility, so they are [00:01:00] building an 8OR facility a few miles down the road. And they are actually on track to open in January 2025.

Erica: So we talked about how he knew it was time, financing, finding contractors, challenges, learnings, and everything in between. And after my conversation with Greg, we are going to end the episode with a brand new segment. I usually try to rotate between sharing the latest news and sharing helpful data, but I thought it would be good to add a new segment around using AI at your ASC.

Erica: It can be really tricky to know how you can start using AI today, especially if it’s a subject you are a bit wary of or just have not had a lot of exposure to. So stay tuned until the end, and I’ll walk you through three very safe and very free ways you can start using AI today. Hope everyone enjoys the episode, and here’s what’s going on this week in surgery centers. [00:02:00] Greg, welcome back to the show.

Greg: Thank you for having me.

Erica: You are actually the final episode in our three part series that is all about expanding your ASC. And I know you are about to do exactly that. So can you please share an overview of the project you’re working on? And what does expansion look like for you?

Greg: Sure. So I’ve operated our three room ASC three OR, one procedure room ASC since 2004. Over 20 years now and seeing the growth in the industry and kind of the highs and not too many lows, but obviously COVID for everybody was a slow down, but we we recognized probably a few years ago that we had to expand to a larger location.

Greg: A lot of that was, came on. Because of our, the growth of our practices, they’re the ones obviously who fill our ORs and our practices grew tremendously and took in a bunch of new young surgeons and everybody wanted block time. And again, we knew because of that and because of people just constantly reaching out that that we needed to expand.

Greg: I say, if I had seven or eight ORs now, we would [00:03:00] actually probably have the most of them full. That’s what the need is. And so we are our 8 OR project just received our deal on approval last month. And we are actively under construction. We’re set to open get the certificate of occupancy in December of 2024.

Greg: And so realistically, building in any kind of delays, any further delays, which there really haven’t been we’re looking at January, February of next year, for sure.

Erica: Very cool. And so how many providers do you have total?

Greg: So there are about 50 surgeons who have interest or want to be, have ownership interest or interest in operating at the facility.

Greg: What we’ve seen in the RAM Massachusetts is that there is very little OR capacity and the hospitals are really over constrained because of. staffing issues, anesthesia issues, et cetera. And what we’ve had is we’ve had providers just jump over the border up in New Hampshire where there’s no CON, DON regulations.

Greg: And so a lot of them have been involved in surgery centers right across the border. And so what we’re trying to do is pull some of them back. [00:04:00] It’s a stressful situation for the surgeons and for the patients, and that drive is not easy. And for us having our project is a 65, 000 square foot project and our ASC is about 35, 000 square feet.

Greg: And so the top two floors of the building are going to be the medical office buildings. And so once again, we’re going along like we did here 20 years ago, the, the idea of a patient be seen there, be operated on there. And we’ll also have physical therapy and MRI, those types of things. So it’s one stop shopping,

Erica: yeah, very cool. So if we think about how you knew it was time, your ORs were bursting at the seams and then just looking at the market, you knew that doctors were leaving the state to be able to perform the surgeries they wanted to. So you knew there was a need market wise as well.

Greg: Yeah, us and orthopedics, I should have mentioned that earlier.

Greg: We do orthopedics and pain management, some general surgery. And so, we’re always the last to do things here, at least on the ASC side. As they’ve been doing, total joints and spine for a long time. We were the first to do them here in Massachusetts on, total.

Greg: shoulder, total hip, total knee, [00:05:00] back in 2016, 2017, but we haven’t been able to really take that next step. Although we’re doing a fair amount of joints because we didn’t build our facility to have the proper sterilization capacity, the proper, PACU capacity to have people stay longer, et cetera.

Greg: And so we’re doing all these procedures now, but we just want to be able to expand and accommodate those. Certainly COVID helped. I think when we opened up before the hospitals for elective surgeries, we had surgeons show up and try and use the facility, get some privileges. And then they realized that the beauty of outpatient surgery and the efficiencies.

Greg: And so again, as I mentioned earlier, if we had this space right now, we’d have it full and so we’re taking advantage of that. It’s a long process. I’m sure those who are listening for that reason. What does that process entail? And so I’m excited to talk about it.

Erica: Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about the initial planning process.

Erica: What did that look like for you?

Greg: Yeah, and this is not all rocket science. You guys all know, and unfortunately you’ll hear some kind of just common themes, but the big thing is, don’t, unless you’ve actually done it before, [00:06:00] don’t just think it’s a, Oh, I can do this type of thing. And I guess we can get to mistakes later on.

Greg: I probably, I fortunately had some guidance and I’ll talk about that in a second, but. There’s some things you realize that, just, it just doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. And so we spent we had a developer that’s helping us and he’s he’s spearheaded the whole project and he had the experience in actually building a new ASC.

Greg: And so he didn’t have the experience of sitting on the healthcare side and the regulatory side, but on the building side, that’s a big part of this. And having someone, who can give you expertise on On, when to pick the architect design team, permitting, all that kind of stuff.

Greg: And so he takes that and runs with it. And he’s also been facilitating, setting up the groups that we’ve put in place to get all these projects done. And one of my big things is again, get, get somebody a developer or somebody to spearhead the project with experience.

Greg: I think if you have a management company they typically are probably involved in this process and they probably can do that for you. If you’re a. A single, a mom and pop shop would just, Noah management company, [00:07:00] that type of thing. You’re just with docs again, reach out to somebody who’s actually done that.

Greg: There’s consultants out there for everything, as and so I take advantage of that. We did a ton of networking early on. So if you don’t know who those consultants are, talk to facilities, that have done this and, you can even see them online and the articles you see out there, et cetera.

Greg: You’ll see who the The places that open, the places in your state that have opened and just give them a call. I find that people oftentimes willing to talk about it and talk about who they used and pluses and minuses of using those people. It was a big process. We toured a bunch of facilities and I think what we found by touring early on, we found facilities that we liked and people have good experiences.

Greg: That’s how we got our architect. Facilities that we like their structure and we feel like they had it all together. That’s what we got our attorneys from, so we didn’t pretend we knew anything and I’ve made that comment already, but we didn’t reinvent the wheel.

Greg: We, we used leaned on people and networking and asking people questions and then we got our experts and we have an equipment planning. who does, who does all, it takes all the stress out of all the equipment, which is a big thing. [00:08:00] Use those experts and again, don’t pretend you can do this thing alone because you want to lean on those people to do a lot of the leg work and get you focused and quarterback on the whole thing,

Erica: yeah, I think that’s great advice. We’ve, you’re a part of our DeNovo series we did last year, but we, in talking to all these consultants, they had so many horror stories of people who tried to do it themselves, missed a step in the beginning, didn’t realize it, now they’re 30 days from opening, and they missed some certification, .

Erica: And now they got to wait another six months.

Greg: Yeah, there’s stuff we’ve missed. And I think, it goes back to that developer you select or somebody who’s going to be the point person for you, we didn’t, ours was not involved in healthcare. And so we, there are some issues we’ve had along the way because of that.

Greg: So again, Really interviewing this person, knowing you’re, partnering up with is really important.

Erica: Yeah, for sure. So how did you approach financing this project?

Greg: So our developer is pretty comprehensive, and this is one of the areas that was in his wheelhouse.

Greg: So he actually helped us with Securing financing [00:09:00] healthcare, especially our market is unbelievably financed in a bowl because we especially have a track is a track record, right? We had a 20 year track record with amazing consistency as far as volume and revenue goes and so The bank’s that a lot.

Greg: Again, don’t be an expert in finance. There’s brokers out there They get a fee of course, but at least they’ll do the homework for you the same thing you always hear about shop around, you know get multiple quotes all that kind of stuff, but The developer did a lot of that for us You But, I was in the room for those initial meetings with the banks.

Greg: We had to make the decisions about locking the raid versus not locking. We’ve had the issues with budget overruns and how to deal with that. And we got 41 doctors to invest in the building and put up capital to to build this building. And we did that because I think we had a lot of stuff organized and, the banks like that.

Greg: Put your docs behind you and and your history. If you’ve had If you’ve had, history, put, get that, those records together, brag about yourself. And if it’s a DeNovo project. Again, you have docs behind you. You probably have a track record coming from somewhere, and just tell your story.

Greg: And again [00:10:00] you’ll be amazed that it’s pretty financeable. Of course, when we did it a couple of years ago, rates were a lot better. But again there’s money out there to be had, so you just gotta go after it.

Erica: Yeah. I would imagine having 41 investors near you at all times.

Erica: Do you get a lot of questions? A lot, they pull you aside, ask for updates. How do you keep them updated on what’s going on and happy?

Greg: Yeah. And one of the things that I think one of our I guess I could say it’s a pitfall, but what we’ve learned along the way is that over communicating is not a bad thing, right?

Greg: So we have a lot of standing meetings again. I talked I said this from the onset it’s a lot of work a lot of work and so So you’ll have to commit a lot of your personal time if you will in the evenings because you have to have your meeting in The evening with the doc, right? But you have them and you’ll find over time as I think people become comfortable with it Those in person meetings that become zoom meetings that become You Email updates are all fine as long as you’re communicating, but we have a lot of a board that’s strong.

Greg: Again, you want to have physician leaders if you’re doing a physician project and, if there’s a management company, obviously they’d have to say as well, but [00:11:00] have this board who’s, who’s well versed, has all the different disciplines involved. If you’re a multi specialty center and and they’re meeting often, probably once a month and maybe even twice a week.

Greg: I’m sorry twice a month to start at least and then you, again, you progress over time and then you have, then you can bring in all stakeholders because they don’t want to be as involved and you know who they are, the people who don’t really care as much, but they want to know and you have these meetings scheduled and some will show and some don’t out of the 41 on those means we sometimes get 7, 8, 10 people when it’s a hot item, we’ll get half the people, so if it’s really hot, we’ll get everybody.

Greg: And this day of zoom and that kind of stuff, it makes it a little bit easier. But you have to over communicate, you have to give them what you need. And I always say even an email or, something that they can just read and then if they ever come back to you, you always have your paper trail, right?

Erica: Yep. Great advice. So what unexpected challenges or issues have you encountered so far?

Greg: You have to realize if you build in a new project, you’re the construction stuff is real. If you’ve done anything on your own your own construction projects, there’s constantly delays and subs that pull out or can’t [00:12:00] finish.

Greg: And so expect the delays again, as long as you’re communicating and have, our construction folks have regular weekly meetings and they’re constantly on top of it. That’s why I think our construction, our date hasn’t changed. I’ll be honest with you. It really hasn’t changed for a while because I think they do such a good job of meeting.

Greg: And again, meetings can be difficult, can be a pain in the neck, but I think they’re they’re really important to keep everybody in the same schedule. Again, be prepared for construction delays and build that into your contingency, especially if you’re planning on, wanting to open, right?

Greg: Like for us, for example, we were in a spot right now and what really triggered our move was our lease ending. And so we got an extension beyond when we think we’re going to open because we’re just planning for that. Be prepared for costs being out of whack. Our budget has changed in two years just because of.

Greg: of strictly costs and, and materials that could be delivered in time. So we’ve had to change materials, all that kind of stuff. So I think those are really important when you do your loan. I think, plan for that built in a good contingency basis for, that you can pull from if there’s issues on the cost side or the delay sides.

Greg: And then the last thing was, I [00:13:00] think any hiccups we’ve had. have been from not communicating. There’s been times where information wasn’t communicated on the construction side of things. And so I think that’s I’ve mentioned that a number of times already. So just, making sure everyone’s aware, even if it’s an email that, that is, it’s comprehensive.

Greg: I always advise when you’re in your, when you’re giving information to surgeons or. Physicians to really make it simple and bold because everyone’s busy with the basics and then attach other information Or more detail below that they can get to but get those points up front In a clear concise fashion because that’s the only way they’ll communicate with you or they’ll actually read it On the other only other hiccups are we did a tour We did last week actually we did a open house and that staff walked through and even though I had employed a process where along the design design decision making, tree, if you will, I pulled different people from different disciplines in and the people who weren’t pulled in, they then when they did the tour, they were like, Oh, where’s this?

Greg: Where’s that? And so you’re never gonna make everybody happy. But I think first off don’t [00:14:00] pretend you can, how a nurse does things in in, in pre op or PACU when you don’t work in that area. Or you can’t speak to it. So bring people in. Not only does it add to like employee satisfaction because they feel like they’re being involved, but again they’ll pick up on stuff.

Greg: You’ll never pick up on. I never ever make a decision. Design wise or process wise without involving my staff. I just know I’ll make a mistake with it. And so if we’ve prevented some hiccups because we’ve done that, I wonder if we could have, I realized last week, if we should have involved maybe the whole PACU or, Nursing staff because the other ones who weren’t involved, then you get the, Oh, why wasn’t I involved or I think differently type of thing, so it’s just one of those things.

Greg: So again, just like you’re involving the docs in this, you’re communicating with them, you’re communicating with the staff as much as possible. When you get to these complex equipment decisions, et cetera, Or kind of flow decisions and processes again, involve the staff, involve the docs as many as you can, because you’ll be not only will it [00:15:00] help you, but then you’ll see, you’ll get more buy in and it just raises overall level of satisfaction.

Erica: Yeah. And I think even all your advice is a whole discussion for me, the underlying theme has just been building that trust and maintaining that trust amongst everybody. And that’s what you’re doing with the over communication, for to have 41. Surgeons buy in, like they have an extremely high amount of trust in you.

Erica: And it sounds like, you don’t take that lightly. And even, but even with your staff too, keeping them involved, like everyone’s just got to be on the same page all so do you have any key recommendations for other ASC admins considering an expansion?

Erica: If you could go back in time.

Greg: Yeah, I guess I’ll I’ll just, Summarize with the things I said already. Getting that developer, getting that point person networking, touring places, go actually take the time and go and tour, especially a place that’s going to be similar.

Greg: Like I toured larger centers, right? I charged toward larger ortho centers, lean on your vendors. They have a lot of resources. A lot of them have the [00:16:00] ASC teams now, especially the bigger, obviously the bigger companies the strikers, the Arthrex, the Smith, the nephews of the world, and they have, they can do a lot of this legwork for you, especially With equipment selection, obviously, but they have teams of engineers that all that kind of stuff.

Greg: It doesn’t really cost you any money and they can actually facilitate those tours. And so lean on those vendors as well. Talked about over communicating with staff and I’m sorry with the surgeons and also the staff involving them in the process. One thing I mentioned was good legal. Make sure you have good legal representation against somebody who’s got experience and you may have to have a vast team.

Greg: You have to have a team that’s experienced with construction. And who’s reviewing your contracts and reviewing all that kind of stuff. They may have to have somebody on the finance side that that are reviewing elements of the finance of the illegally. And then you have get an owner’s rep.

Greg: Is it, so get somebody who can work for you and the docs, you have to pay them. And they’ll be validating all of the constructions. The construction work and we involve them early in the process. And so they’ll know what goes into these [00:17:00] steps and they’ll be able to, it’s a check and balance and money well spent on the contractor.

Greg: And the last thing is, it’s a, one that you probably is not as, as uplifting, but I think the big thing is if you’re trying to do this and run a facility. And think your day job is not, is going to stay the same. It’s not. So you may want to consider some kind of a path where there’s somebody who can cover for you in your day job or do a bulk of that work.

Greg: You’re training somebody, you’re mentoring somebody so you can devote a lot of time because it’s a ton of time. I’m telling you, it’s weekends, it’s nights. And again, I don’t want to be discouraging because the end result is huge, right? But make sure you’re planning for the amount of work you’re going to undertake to do this thing.

Greg: And also before you get into it, maybe you seek compensation, some kind of compensation for it, right? Everybody’s getting paid in these projects, especially the developers and the lawyers and the consultants, right? But what are you getting for your work? And advocate for yourself and realize it’s going to take a lot of time.

Greg: It’s a big step to undertake. So it’s important.

Erica: Yeah, that’s an interesting call out. Has, so aside from [00:18:00] your time, has the expansion project impacted the current surgery centers operations at all?

Greg: No, not only with, I guess I could say the use of staff for some of these things, right?

Greg: So maybe some financially a bit, to some extent the We’re starting, we’re going to start now and the next in the fall and the end of the summer here to work on some of our structure. So like we only have a nurse manager structure now, whoever sees the entire clinical staff, we may go to a PACU manager or manager type, our new structure may work out some of those kinks now.

Greg: And so that may, there may be some, cost overrun. Down the road again. So again, no impact now, but down the road, we may all start to hire and train, right? So we’re building in that, as I mentioned, that contingency or that planning for some expenses coming up, that we’re going to need for the new center and hire and hiring.

Greg: That’s obviously the biggest thing that people get concerned about, right? Besides all of this, you build it and then how are you going to, how are you going to staff it? So not only, medical, clinical staff for you, but also your anesthesiologist, right? A big issue these days.

Greg: And so [00:19:00] how are you going to staff that? And some of that may be mean if their people are available now, we may have to hire them now and, and start to train them until we hit the ground running. But overall it’s, the impact for our area is going to be pretty tremendous.

Greg: We’re a tremendously hospital dominant, denominated market. And so there’s not a ton of ASEs. I’m the head of the ASE association. And I will say that we’ve done, maybe we’ve done a poor job, stagnant. We haven’t, we, our numbers haven’t grown that much. We haven’t also haven’t dropped, I guess you’d say we’re seeing some of the hospitals doing their outpatient things.

Greg: thing but no, not a lot of freestandings. And so to open up our capacity, I think for our docs and maybe even preventing those patients from going across the border and driving postoperatively for two hours after the knee replacement, I think that’s going to be a good thing for our state and for our area.

Greg: For sure.

Erica: Fantastic. I do feel like I could ask you another 30 questions, but I guess I will just ask you the one question we do every week with our guests. What is one thing our listeners can do this week to improve their surgery [00:20:00] centers?

Greg: You said you were going to mention this so I thought about it and I’m like, I wonder if people always mention the thing they probably do the least.

Greg: Or they wish they did more I should say. I, you know I mentioned surgery centers. I just mentioned that, this takes up so much of my time and I feel like we had a really good center and a really great culture. And maybe for me, it’s just, I feel like I’m not as in touch with everybody as I used to be because I don’t, I’m not up and about moving as much.

Greg: And so my one thing I’d say now is again, get out there and. And, you meet with the staff and just see how they’re doing, see what their issues are, see what, what’s bothering them, we just had a staff meeting this morning and we had really good turnout and really good, conversations.

Greg: So I think the FaceTime is really key. If you’re in my spot as administrator, it shows you, you’re, you really care, stop, it’s not just a breeze through, it’s stopping and seeing what people are doing. If you’re clinical, maybe spend some more time in the business office. If you’re business oriented, spend some time in the clinical staff, see what they’re doing, see it, learn, I think it’s important. And the FaceTime for the docs is also, the surgeons that are there. It also shows how much you really care. So building that time, if you can, I think you can do that [00:21:00] right now, right? So that doesn’t take much, just get up and get moving around.

Greg: So. That’s my one tidbit. Yeah.

Erica: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. You’ve shared such great advice to hear from someone who’s actually doing it is super interesting and insightful. So thanks as always. And keep us posted. I

Greg: appreciate it.

Erica: Yeah. Hopefully we’ll be seeing some LinkedIn announcements around December, January of your new facility.

Greg: I hope so. Fingers are crossed. Thank you.

Erica: All right. Thanks, Greg.

Yeah.

Erica: Welcome to our AI segment, where I will share three safe, free, and helpful ways you can start using generative AI at your surgery center today. If you have reservations about using AI or have concerns about how it will be safely implemented in healthcare, you are certainly not alone. Anything that garners so much attention so fast should rightfully give you pause, especially when patient safety could be impacted.

Erica: I feel strongly, [00:22:00] though, that the best way to understand how AI works and what it truly is to just get started and start small and dip your toe in ways over which you have full control and there’s virtually no risk. So I tried to keep all of that in mind when putting together these three examples.

Erica: You’ll definitely notice a theme with the three of them. They are meant to help with some of the lower value tasks, if you will, that are simply administrative and by pulling in some support, you will save a ton of time. These examples are Don’t include PHI, they don’t pose any data risk to you at all, so you should feel very comfortable getting started.

Erica: Lastly, you’ll notice that I referenced ChatGPT in all of these examples, as that is the AI tool that I use. They have a free version that works great, and I would recommend trying, but please know that there are other tools out there if you prefer a different solution. Okay, so use case number one is [00:23:00] creating staff schedules.

Erica: Scheduling staff at your surgery center can be a little complex and time consuming. You have to balance availability, skills, preferences, all while making sure that you have adequate coverage. So ChatGPT can help with this kind of logistical headache. Here’s how it works. So all of these will start with a prompt, right?

Erica: And as you use ChatGPT or other AI solutions more, your prompts will get better and better, and you’ll have to do less tweaking. But, that’s just something that comes with practice. First, you have to input your prompt, right? You want to Input variables such as staff names, their availability, roles, shift preferences, any specific constraints like requested days off or maximum working hours.

Erica: For example, this is a little simplified, but it should give you the concept here. You can use a prompt like I have five nurses. Jenna, Daniel, [00:24:00] Marie, Emma, and Caleb. Our morning shift runs from 7 a. m. to 3 p. m. and the day shift is 11 a. m. to 5 p. m. We are open Monday through Friday. Jenna cannot work Tuesdays.

Erica: Emma cannot do the day shift. Can you please create the schedule for the month of August? It should be as balanced as possible and every person, except for Emma, should do both shifts throughout the week. So in this prompt were giving it kind of those boundaries and parameters. So within seconds, right?

Erica: Chat GPT is going to analyze your prompt and it’s going to generate a schedule that optimizes staff allocation. I would say requests like this will probably be completed by chat GPT in a, oh, definitely under 30 seconds. And you can actually converse with the system too, right? So you can say, Actually, Daniel can’t work August 23rd, can you please tweak that?

Erica: So you can go back and forth with the system, either tweak your prompt or just give feedback after you see what it spit out. And then you [00:25:00] might realize, you missed a holiday in there. You missed okay, wait, I told you Jenna could do day shifts, but she can’t. Whatever it might be, you can go back and forth with the system like that.

Erica: So by using AI, you just streamlined the scheduling process and hopefully it’ll save you a ton of administrative time and also improve staff satisfaction if they know it’s done with a fair, if the schedule has been created in a fair and unbiased way. And then with all of these prompts too, over time.

Erica: Any AI tool will learn from your feedback and will continuously improve. So even if you didn’t put it in the prompt, it’s going to look at its memory history, and it’s going to see, oh, last time we did X and they liked it. So let’s do it again. That kind of thing. So that’s your first example, creating those staff schedules.

Erica: Use case number two would be patient education materials. So providing proper education to your patients obviously helps decrease the repetitive questions your staff [00:26:00] gets. It helps make patients feel safer and keep them engaged, and it will also improve your outcomes. So here’s how AI can help. Let’s say your ASC keeps getting the same patient question, right?

Erica: How long will it take me to recover from my total knee arthroplasty? And you want to create some collateral to give to the patient or maybe even use on your website. So you can go to ChatGPT and say something like, My surgery center keeps getting the same patient question. How long will it take me to recover from my total knee arthroplasty?

Erica: Can you please create a one page document that very simply explains CPT two, seven, four, four, seven answers, how long it will take to recover and any other frequently asked questions, a reminder that this procedure will be done in an outpatient setting. So that’s your whole prompt right there. So it’s funny because.

Erica: that last sentence, a reminder that this procedure will be done in an outpatient setting, is something that I’ve learned from using chat GPT. [00:27:00] So when I first put that prompt in without that reminder, it spit out everything I needed, except, you It was for a hospital setting. So that was the tweet, so after I got what got back, which had GPT created, I replied and said, thanks so much.

Erica: However, this is actually going to be done in outpatient setting. Can you please update? And it did exactly that. So again, just learning those prompts and tweaks as you go. All of that to say, within seconds, you ChachiPT will give you back what you asked for and typically will expand in areas it thinks would be helpful.

Erica: Now, because this is going to the patient, you want to, of course, go through it with a fine tooth comb, make any necessary tweaks. The system is really good, but it’s not perfect, so that clinical review will be key. But if I had to guess, you’d likely be able to use at least 90 percent of what ChachiPT gives you.

Erica: GPT has created for you, and it might actually spark other content ideas. And you could continue using that content wherever you need it. So that second example was patient [00:28:00] education. All right, and our last use case today is around post op instructions. So very similar to the above, you could ask chat GPT something like, Can you please write very simple post op instructions to a patient who just had their cataracts removed?

Erica: So Giving more examples of those prompts in that tweaks and how we’re evolving our requests, maybe that they were they what they create is just a little too heavy on the medical jargon. It’s a little too advanced. You could then say, thanks, that all looks great, but can you please use a tone that is compassionate and direct, and please explain it in layman’s terms.

Erica: So you can keep tweaking it as you go until you get the exact answer that you want. So now we’re starting to add in guidance around tone and complexity levels, all of which, obviously, you can tweak in your prompt for the next time, but just a learning from this time. Now again, this [00:29:00] example with the post op instructions is truly medical advice.

Erica: You’ll absolutely want to give it a read and make edits before publishing it. I would anticipate that you would need to update it based on your ASC’s policies and what your physicians recommend, but it will hopefully get you, maybe 80 to 90 percent there and save you a ton of time. So there you have it.

Erica: Three examples of how you can start using AI at your surgery center today. And Re quick recap, we’re creating staff schedules, creating patient education copy, and creating post op instructions. If you give any of these a try, or if you have any other ideas, please let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Erica: And we’ll do this segment again on the August 13th episode, and I will share three new ideas. And that officially wraps up this week’s podcast. Thank you, as always, for spending a few minutes of your week with us. Make sure to subscribe or leave a review on whichever platform you’re listening from. I hope you have a great day, and we will see you again next week.

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