Intermountain Healthcare’s new Park City Surgery Center — just a parking lot away from the Park City Hospital — is meant to save patients money.
According to the center’s manager/administrator, Rob Northrup, the center has already been open and serving patients for several months, but has just recently had its official opening and now expects a higher influx of ambulatory operations, meaning surgeries where the patient can be released within 24 hours.
Due to the smaller amount of time a patient needs to spend in an ambulatory center to recover from their operation, the cost of the procedure is notably less than what it would be were an individual to receive the same treatment in a hospital, he said.
Though the amount saved will vary depending on factors such as what surgery is performed and how a patient’s insurance will provide coverage, 2021 data collected by the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association indicated that these centers saved over $42 million in Medicare costs that year.
Dr. Alexander Ramirez, the senior medical director of surgical specialties and digestive health at Intermountain Health, said that while surgical centers have been around since the 1970s, their specializations allow them to “focus on getting people to recover from these specific types of surgeries.”
Since surgical centers first opened, he said, the list of operations able to be performed in the facilities has lengthened due not only to technological advances that allow operations to be performed less invasively and with more efficiency, but also because of lessons learned in the medical field.
“When I was a resident, we kept thyroid surgery patients in the hospital for a week,” he said. “Now we know they do way better when they go home sooner and start moving. It is not an outpatient surgery.”
He added that the COVID-19 pandemic also became a factor in expanding the operations that can be safely completed in a surgical center as hospitals met their capacity limits.
In a world with growing health-care costs, he deemed surgical centers to be a critical way patients can receive the care they need without paying more than necessary.
“Everything that’s outpatient orthopedic surgery, we’re going to move here,” Intermountain Healthcare Marketing and Communications Manager Amy Tuddenham said about the Park City center. “This is a lower-cost setting for our patients, and one of Intermountain Healthcare’s goals is to make sure that we go to the lowest-cost setting.”
She said the surgery center — one of 10 in Utah — follows a similar logic to Intermountain Healthcare’s InstaCare centers, which were established in part to ensure that people who do not need emergency room treatment do not pay emergency room prices for unanticipated health issues that can be treated at a lower cost.
“We looked at the data across the Wasatch Back, and we were able to say we are seeing a ton of patients in the emergency room that could really be better treated in the urgent care at a lower cost setting,” Tuddenham said. “That’s one of our keyholes.”
Patients typically prefer to pay a lower cost for their operations, he noted.
“If the patients have the ability to wait and have it done in an outpatient,” Northrup said, “more likely than not that patient will choose to at a lower cost.”
The hospital “is based off of a totally different billing matrix,” whereas the ambulatory surgery center offers operations at a set cost.
“Everything’s included at that set price, so that’s totally different from the hospital where they charge per item, per implant and everything is included in your bill,” he said.
The allure of a lower price, however, doesn’t mean someone can try to have a kidney transplant and rush the recovery process to under 24 hours.
“There’s an extensive preassessment process that we go through to make sure that they’re a candidate … so everything’s safe,” Northrup said. “There’s a lot of steps that go in to actually get a patient that’s approved.”
That process, Tuddenham added, includes analysis “of the whole health of the patient.”
“We are always patient safety first,” Tuddenham said. “We are going to also look at where is the safest setting for this surgery.”
Northrup said the surgery center will soon see an exponential rise in patients, as it recently received the Joint Commission’s accreditation and a certification number for the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“If a patient needs to stay over for whatever reason,” Northrup said, “then we have the ability to keep them over night per se. Ambulatory is basically 23 hours and 59 minutes. So as long as you’re out before 24 hours, that constitutes an ambulatory surgery.”