Inflation + ASCs, Hidden Costs of ASC Transcription Services

Erik Sunset: [00:00:00] All right. Hello and welcome back. I’m Erik Sunset, your host of the DocBuddy Journal. Here at DocBuddy, we deliver healthcare solutions that take the pain and cost out of broken workflows. Like with DocBuddy Op Note, which gives ASCs and their affiliated clinics the power of instantly generated operative reports approved from the point of care.

You can learn more about Op Note and all of our solutions at docbuddy.com. So, hello again, we are well into January 2025 and I wanted to provide our listeners a quick update on the next place you’ll be able to see DocBuddy and our team in person. And that’s going to be in Atlanta. That is when we kick off the DocBuddy Roadshow.

We’ll be in Atlanta for the joint Georgia and South Carolina semi annual conference. That is March 20th through the 21st. The conference is taking place at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly Hotel and Convention Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Always [00:01:00] great to be in the Peach State. Listeners will know that that is just a hop, skip, and a jump for me, uh, from Miami, Florida.

So looking forward to seeing all of our Georgia and South Carolina based listeners, uh, there in Atlanta in just two months, I guess. And then from there ASCA, excuse me, ASCA 2025 is taking their annual conference to Denver. And that’s kind of cool for DocBuddy being that we’re headquartered in Denver, Colorado.

And we’re really looking forward to ASCA 2025 to see all of our friends, our clients, our partners in the space. It’s going to be a great show. That one’s happening at the new Gaylord Resort, which is pretty near to the airport. And everything I’ve heard about that Very new, uh, Gaylord Rockies there in Denver.

It’s going to be a great spot for a great meeting. And as always, if you’ll be attending or exhibiting at any of these events, I hope you’ll reach out and [00:02:00] let us know. Don’t be a stranger. You certainly know how to reach us on, uh, on LinkedIn or on our website, docbody. com. And with that, let’s get into the meat of the show today, and this topic comes to us from Becker’s ASC, and we actually recorded a really great episode with the one and only Scott Becker late in December, so you may have missed it.

It was published just the week before the Christmas break. You know, Hanukkah coincided with Christmas this year, which is cool. So if you didn’t download it, and you didn’t take it on the road with you while you were Bye. Bye. Bye. Um, enjoying all of the holiday and winter festivities, do it now. That was episode 88.

You can get to that on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or even our YouTube channel has our podcast library on there. So episode 88 with Scott Becker, what a thrill to have him on. He is absolutely a powerhouse in the space, as you know. And we want to thank him [00:03:00] especially, uh, for the content that we’re going to cover today, which is all about inflation and how it’s impacting ASCs in 2025.

I thought this would be an interesting topic. You know, we had, uh, Mark Ryan, uh, policy wonk, I guess, if you will, on just before Scott, we talked about the outcomes of the election, the CMS 2025 final payment rule. And what that could look like for ASCs and healthcare providers going forward into this new year.

Um, since then, obviously we’ve had Inauguration Day, we’ve got a new president, and there are some sort of overhanging inflationary and cost factors that we want to cover for surgery centers now in 2025. And let’s start with the consumer price index increase, which is another way to talk about inflation, but the CPI increase for December 2024, uh, the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics [00:04:00] shows that inflation rose 0.

4 percent from November to December 2024, but 2. 9 percent is the number. When we’re talking about CPI, uh, for December, 2024, so that’s not great. When you pair that with the increase in inflation year over year from December, 2024 to December, 2023, that number is 3.2%. And these are things that you can see on the news.

You can see this in legacy media, not just from your your favorite health IT flavored podcast, which is obviously the DocBuddy journal. But things aren’t getting any cheaper. There’s a lot of high hopes from some that the new administration can do some things to curb these increases in costs. We’ll see.

Our next stats in five numbers on inflation and how it’s impacting ASCs in 2025 is [00:05:00] 13 lucky number 13. And that is the number of specialties that saw a year over year pay increase of 3. 4 percent or less. So better put in my opinion, uh, 13 specialties. got a pay increase of 3. 4 percent or less. And if you look at data from May of 2024 from BLS, which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this means that 12 specialties, all with pay increases of 2%, report on physician comp, essentially received a pay cut compared to their 2023 salaries.

We’ve been banging this drum for a long time. This is episode 90, or this will be episode 90 by the time that you listen to it. So almost a hundred episodes of talking about health IT, burnout, meaningful technology for providers, helping physicians and other providers practice at the top of their license as [00:06:00] opposed to administrative work.

You know, we love our independent practices. And when you see stats, or when we see stats, that effectively, uh, many of these Specialties received a year over year pay cut that is not doing anything to help our independent, independent physicians. Things like this certainly drive burnout. Call into question why I would go remain in medicine and certainly would steer my children away from medicine if they were interested in following in my footsteps.

You know, from a third party point of view, obviously I’m not a provider. We can’t keep have this having this happen. We can’t continue to pay providers less. Increase their burnout. And then wonder why we’re facing this physician shortage. And by the way, just to reference the Scott Becker episode one more time, he had a really great take on keeping physicians employed and then broadening the reach of medical [00:07:00] schools and getting more students interested in becoming doctors.

So do look at that episode 88. Right now, we’ve covered the 2. 9 percent consumer price index increase. We’ve talked about 3. 2%, the increase in year over year inflation for December 24 over December 23. And then 13, the number of specialties that saw year over year pay increase of 3. 4 percent or less. And that takes us to the next number, which is 2.

3%. And this is the decline in physician reimbursement amounts per Medicare patient between 2005 and 2021 when you account for inflation. And this stat comes from the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute. This ties into our previous stats around year over year pay cuts for providers. We’ve got a lot of smart people looking at this problem, you know, we are continuing to [00:08:00] raise awareness that we’re on the precipice of an outright shortage of physicians in AmErika.

It’s already happening, but we’ll be at a critical point for availability of providers before 2030. So when you have folks like the Harvey L. Nieman Health Policy Institute looking into these stats and hopefully advocating for our friends that are practitioners, we cannot keep paying providers less. And then our final stat, 82%.

And this is going to hit home for all of our friends, especially at the ASC, but 82 percent is the increase in supply costs per full time employee from 2013 to 2022 for physician owned. Multi-specialty practices, and this data comes from a May report published by the MGMA, the Medical Group Management Association who, you know, we asked Scott kind of tongue in [00:09:00] cheek, what’s the silver lining with the CMS 2025 final payment rule.

You look at that through the lens of nearly a doubling in supply cost per full-time employee or FTE from 2013 to 2022. I would imagine the 23 and 24 data will be just as unfriendly to our, not just friends and independent practices and independent ASCs, but for all of medicine. This is another stat that is just not sustainable.

And there’s also an interesting twist here that the increase in supply cost per full time employee. I wonder, and I don’t have this date in front of me, I probably should. I wonder though, what that COVID decrease in headcounts, decrease in hiring, and then coming out the other side, the difficulty in making new hires.

I wonder how that skews the data, because we hear from clients across all [00:10:00] settings of care from the practice to the ASC and everywhere in between, it’s still really tough to make a hire. So there might be a slight twist in this data that the increase in supply cost per full time employee may be artificially inflated due to the lack of staffing or the inability to 2020 till, till even till now.

And that kind of takes us to our third and final point, we’ve talked about where you can see us next, which is in Atlanta and then in Denver for ASCA. These five stats around inflation and how it’s impacting ASCs for this year. The third and final point kind of ties into this. That the numbers we just shared around inflation relate very closely to a recent blog post that you can get on docbuddy.

com slash blog. It’s called the hidden cost of ASC transcription services where we’re calling out three hidden factors that [00:11:00] are hurting your margins. And these five stats around inflation were plenty of bad news if you weren’t already familiar with them. There’s a little bit more bad news. And these hidden costs for ASC transcription services total just about 90, 000 bucks per year in addition to the amount you’re paying for your transcription service.

And this isn’t just a DocBuddy estimate out of our marketing department. This data is actually coming directly from our, from our clients. We aggregated it, averaged it out, and ASCs that have the legacy transcription workflow are incurring almost 100, 000 per year in addition to the cost of their transcription services.

There’s good news though. Our ASC clients are literally telling us that switching to our Op Note solution is saving them that almost 100, 000 per year in [00:12:00] actual hard costs. That’s not even mentioning the time value of money and the elimination of accounts receivable that Op Note delivers to these facilities.

What I mean by that is we’re taking the time to bill down from days to hours. And just to make the point abundantly clear, with these legacy transcription service workflows, there’s some amount of lag. There’s some amount of delay that are inherent to them. So your provider is generating a voice file somehow, some way, that needs to go somewhere to be transcribed.

And then that needs to come back and be signed off on by the surgeon, and then at that point it can go to billing. There’s certainly some really tightly run ships out there, and the ships being surgery centers where you don’t have a ton of delay, you’ve got an acceptable amount of delay. What if you could get rid of all of that delay outright?

With Op Note, [00:13:00] claims can be submitted the same day that the procedure is performed. There’s only as much delay in this process as you, the ASC, will allow. So having heard that, or having said that, I’d recommend you do two things from here. Number one, go check out the blog post. We’ll obviously have a link to the post in the show notes.

We’ll also put a link to the Becker’s ASC article in the show notes for you too. And then number two, get in touch with us so you can see Op Note for yourself. These are pretty tall claims and they seem, uh, maybe unrealistic at a surface level. So get in touch with us, set up a demo of Op Note for yourself so you can see exactly what we’re talking about.

And I have this happen at Any event, any trade show where I personally attend, hear from the team as well, you see our booth, instant operative reports. That’s what we’re all about. You have folks walk up and say, instant. Hmm. We’ll see. [00:14:00] That’d be really interesting if you could do that. A little incredulous and I understand them.

There’s been nothing like Op Note in the market. To date you’re dealing with a 100 year old workflow, which is transcription But when you take the 30 seconds in person to see just how quickly your surgeons can generate and approve operative reports And if you care about images just how quickly those images can be incorporated into the opera the final operative report as well Seeing becomes believing because you take that 30 seconds to generate your operative report sign off on it and then wherever it needs to go from there Whether that’s your billing team, your outsourced revenue cycle, certainly back into your ASC’s EHR, even the provider’s EHR, then it clicks, then it clicks.

The concept is simple instant operative reports, but there’s layers to it. Uh, layers of value that you really need to take a look at it to fully understand. So with that, I hope to hear from you soon to set up your [00:15:00] demo of DocBuddy op notes. And on behalf of the entire DocBuddy team, I want to thank you for listening.

Be sure you’re subscribed on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. So you can always get the newest episodes of the show. And until next time, I’m your host, Erik sunset. We’ll talk to you again soon.