By Stephen W. Earnhart, MS
CEO
Earnhart & Associates
Austin, TX
I receive a considerable amount of email after each column. Some is good, some is bad. Some is cute, some is nasty. However, most of the comments I get ask for more “Questions & Answers” from readers. So, here you go!
Question: Our website was hacked recently, and it took a lot of time to fix it and make it secure (we hope) again. Are there companies out there that cater to healthcare facilities and understand HIPPA compliance?
Answer: There are several actually that we use: TechMD.systems, Definitive Healthcare, and Your Tech Guys, to name a few. Web site and data protection is becoming a big issue in the industry, as hacking becomes more and more prominent in our industry.
Question: Our surgery center doesn’t make a profit at all. I just started working here about a month ago, and I was shocked to learn from the administrator that we just break even financially. I always assumed that freestanding surgery centers were really profitable, and that is why I wanted to get out of the not-for-profit hospital and into one. Is this place an outlier? Did I pick the wrong surgery center to leave my job at the hospital for? I am amazed that no one here is freaking out about it and afraid that it might be closing because of it. Have you heard of places like this?
Answer: First, welcome to the “private sector” of healthcare. There are hundreds, and I do mean, hundreds, of surgery centers in the some 6,700 odd number of surgery centers out there that make absolutely no profit whatsoever.
Guess what? They were never intended to! While many have forgotten, the reason most surgery centers were started some 30 years ago was not for money, but rather for productivity. Now, with that being said, “profitability” does not always relate to dollars. Many of these “not-making-a-profit” surgery centers have tax-free profits in the form of “time.”
Your surgeons can reap a great deal of “time profit” by being much more productive in case schedules, faster room turnover, on-time starts, and hand-picked staff. That “time profit” means the surgeons can spend less time in the operating room or hospital, and more time in the office seeing new patients, having more free time, or just not worrying about being bumped by other cases or late starts that interfere with their practices. By owning their own surgery center, they can control much more of their practice efficiency. That efficiency often is worth much more than taxable distributions from a surgery center.
So, did you pick the wrong place to work? No. In fact, you probably are better off where you are than a place that relies on “dollar profits” to stay open. That statement doesn’t mean that the bottom line isn’t important. It is. Just as the chain facilities live and die by the bottom line, not losing money is critical to your facility to stay in business.
Have a question, and want an unbiased answer? Send it to me. Your privacy is always secure! [Earnhart can be reached at phone (512) 297-7575. E-mail: [email protected]. Web: www.earnhart.com.]
