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OR Excellence Awards - September 2020 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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many times we find stuff a lot cheaper online," she says. "And Amazon's fulfillment facility is right behind us, so that helps." Eye 35 even works with another ASC to trade supplies to avoid paying overnight shipping costs. Ms. McCafferty and her team also convinced the center's two surgeons to compromise on a single, standard instrument tray, further slashing costs. • Going paperless. The amount of time the cen- ter's staff spent making paper charts was not time well spent. Eye 35 finally transitioned to an elec- tronic health record this summer. "We expect, and our goal is, that within six months this system will have paid for itself," says Ms. McCafferty. "It helps to reduce supply and payroll expenses, it's made us more efficient and our charts look much better." • Verifying op notes. A nurse reviews all op notes at the end of each day to check for mistakes before sending them to a third-party billing depart- ment. "We're making sure all cases are documented correctly, because coding mistakes lead to money we'd miss out on," says Ms. McCafferty. Fundamental success Due to the pandemic, case volumes were down in June and flat in July compared with 2019 numbers, according to Mr. Alvarado. However, he predicts steady improvement in case volumes the rest of the year. The center's proactive financial management philosophy helped it survive and thrive during the pandemic. Mr. Alvarado believes COVID-19 is ulti- mately going to make the center even more finan- cially solvent. "I think we'll be more efficient moving forward and pay more attention to our benchmarking num- bers as well as our forecasting and actual num- bers," he says. "If we had a lot of supply and capi- tal expenses over the past few months, I don't think our numbers would look as clean as they do now." OSM S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0 • O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y . N E T • 4 1 WWW.AORN.ORG/SYNTEGRITY Decrease Surgical Risks with Evidence-based Perioperative Content for Your EHR AORN Syntegrity is built by perioperative clinicians to decrease surgical risks, VXSSRUWPRUHHɝFLHQWSURFHVVHVVWDQGDUGL]HFDUHSURWRFROVDQGORZHUFRVWV The content is created using evidence-and standards-based practices including AORN's Guidelines for Perioperative Practice0DNH\RXUMREHDVLHUDQG\RXU SDWLHQWVVDIHUZLWKSHULRSVSHFLȴFFRQWHQW NEW! Ambulatory-Specific Perioperative Documentation Content Now Available

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