St. Mark’s Surgical Center

With three operating rooms and two procedure rooms, St. Mark’s serves the Fort Myers, Florida, area with outpatient ophthalmology services in a state-of-the-art, patient-centered facility. Known for their commitment to high-quality patient care, St. Mark’s, an AAAHC-accredited center, annually performs over 8,500 procedures.

St. Mark’s Surgical Center, in conjunction with its partner, VMG Health, an organization that helps ASCs enhance their operational and financial outcomes, identified several areas for improvement at the center, including:

• Pre-surgical patient payment collections. The ASC did not have structured billing or patient collections processes in place, and they were unable to quickly see how much money they were leaving on the table.
• Over-ordering supplies and medications. The lack of an inventory management system resulted in an excess of costly supplies and medications that went unused.
• Too many discrete software packages. Using separate software solutions for billing, scheduling, patient questionnaires, and patient texting was costly and inefficient.

VMG Health recommended that the St. Mark’s team consider a comprehensive, cloud-based software solution from the ASC's current vendor, Surgical Information Systems (SIS). An updated solution would help the center streamline its operations. The St. Mark’s team chose SIS Advanced™.

SIS Advanced, designed uniquely for ASCs, combines the capabilities of the SIS Office™ business office management solution with powerful communication tools, including a user-friendly patient portal (SIS Exchange™), mobile access for physicians (SIS Physician Mobile™), case coordination, and more.

More than 1,000 ASCs in the United States have selected a SIS cloud solution, including SIS Advanced. This unmatched experience of working with ASCs, combined with SIS’ hands-on approach, helped ensure a smooth implementation for St. Mark’s.

“When we implemented SIS Advanced, we had weekly calls with the SIS team to learn SIS Advanced, which really helped us get into the groove of using a new system,” said Dawn Sinclair, St. Mark’s business office manager. “SIS is very user-friendly, so it’s not difficult to navigate through the system. If any of us need a refresher or if we have a new team member join, we can access helpful videos and documentation directly in SIS Advanced.”

The core component of SIS Advanced is the SIS Office ASC management module, which includes scheduling, inventory management, and revenue cycle management. SIS Office has built-in workflow trackers for each step in the revenue cycle process, allowing staff to see the current status of cases and what work remains to be completed.

“The workflow trackers in SIS give us structure we didn’t have before to make sure we are completing all our tasks in a timely manner,” said Sinclair. “You can set a reminder for a task, and sure enough, it will remind you to complete that task.”

SIS Advanced also includes SIS Exchange, a secure and easy-to-use portal that enables patients to complete pre-op and post-op questionnaires, receive important reminders, review instructions and disclosures, and view cost estimates.

“Because we’re able to communicate a patient’s financial responsibility to them in advance of surgery, we now collect 80% of payments prior to surgery,” said St. Mark's Administrator Shellie Rivera, RN. “Everything we need to code a case and submit a claim is in one system. We submit insurance claims typically within four hours of the case being completed.”

Another area of its operations that St. Mark’s targeted for improvement was inventory management. “Historically, inventory had not been well-tracked,” said Sinclair. “We weren’t ordering according to case volume, so we had excess supplies that ultimately got thrown away.”

With SIS Advanced, St. Mark’s finally had a system for managing their supplies. “Our on-hand inventory has since gone down drastically," adds Sinclair. "Being able to track what we’ve ordered with the included inventory module has led us to have some blockbuster financial months.”

With new systems in place to manage its inventory and revenue cycle, St. Mark's was able to utilize the powerful case costing capabilities of SIS Advanced, allowing the ASC to achieve additional cost savings.

“Having access to case costing opened our eyes to the high-cost supplies our surgeons were using,” said Rivera. “Our materials manager can pull data for each surgeon to show them the cost per case, and they can work together on finding ways to reduce costs by ordering different medications or implants or by simply using a different vendor.”

SIS Advanced includes a variety of tools to help enhance and streamline communication, like case coordination functionality and SIS Physician Mobile, which gives clinical staff the ability to view their surgical schedule and review pre-op/post-op reports and case attachments from their mobile devices.

“There are so many efficiencies we didn’t have before implementing SIS Advanced,” said Nancy Stephens, senior consultant with VMG Health. “St. Mark’s uses SIS’ case coordination to its fullest extent. Communication within the center is more effective, and relationships with partners and vendors have improved. The physicians no longer have to call or email the center to get their schedules or have attachments faxed to them.”

St. Mark’s Surgical Center continues to experience financial and operational benefits thanks to SIS Advanced. In the first six months after implementing SIS Advanced:

• 80% of payments were collected from patients prior to surgery;
• collections per case increased by over 17%; and
• days in accounts receivable (A/R) decreased by 6.5%.

With ASC management functions in a single platform, St. Mark’s can easily monitor and report on its performance. “Reporting in SIS is substantial,” said Stephens. “Board presentations have gone from 100 pages of nothing to five pages of substantial, meaningful data that helps the board understand how they’re doing.”

In addition, since St. Mark's is centralized on SIS Advanced, the ASC no longer pays for multiple software platforms. “Moving to a single ASC solution has had a positive impact on St. Mark’s,” said Stephens. “Staff morale is up because they don’t have to learn separate products and maintain separate logins.”

The team at St. Mark’s enthusiastically refers SIS to their peers who are looking to modernize their software and enhance their ASC’s operations. Rivera shared, “If someone were to ask me whether they should implement SIS, I would tell them, ‘Definitely! You can thank me later.’”