Op Note Rave Reviews + Cardio in the ASC

Erik Sunset: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Hello and welcome back. I’m Erik Sunset, host of this show, the DocBuddy Journal. This is episode one 15. Thanks for joining us. Whether this is your first time, uh, listening to the show, or you are a long time listener, I’m glad you’re here. I am also sorry that we missed you last week. That is 100% on me.

I was out of commission with a pretty bad cold and you can still hear a little bit, uh, of it in my voice. Hopefully that’s not too big of a deal for all of you. And I did want to point out that we should be having a fantastic guest next week. I’m gonna leave it at that as a teaser. So today’s gonna be a little bit of a shorter format, like I promised you earlier on this year.

So with that said, let’s get into it. We’ve got two topics today. Topic one is gonna be a quick anecdote from a recent go live. Um, and this is all coming to us from one of [00:01:00] our fantastic account managers, Stephanie Paris. Stephanie is a, uh, Florida based DocBuddy such as myself. Uh, she’s a little bit north of me.

I’m, I’m down here in Miami, so she’s just a straight shot up 95, um, up kind of near the Daytona Beach area. Uh, but she has recently taken a new account live on our DocBuddy op note platform. And if you’re not familiar with op note, I would highly encourage you to go take a look at op note on our website, DocBuddy.com.

Uh, you can get to it on the solutions tab. The 22nd overview of Op Note is that Op Note delivers instant operative reports. Uh, it is also a facilitator for your revenue cycle. It’s a facilitator to reduce staff labor utilization. Um, it’s really a cure all. For all the things that could potentially go wrong with like a transcription process or a pen and paper op report [00:02:00] process.

Or even worse, like a Google Docs or Microsoft Word op report process. Um, that’s not the point though. Um, if you’ve heard the show before, you’ve heard me talk about OPT No in an awful lot. And if you haven’t get to our website and uh, that can fill you. Okay, so this is a, a go live for a new op note account.

It’s a multi-specialty surgery center here in Florida, and I’m gonna leave it at that. Uh, none of this is like a state secret, but just out of respect for our customer and for the surgeon, we’re gonna quote here. Um, I’m gonna keep ’em anonymous. If you wanna know who it is, I’ll tell you. And we can even set up a conversation, uh, with the account if they’re open to it.

Uh, you can email me at eric@docbuddy.com or send in the forum on the site. Uh, but very excited to share this piece of feedback with you, uh, that going through the Go live process, which is actually incredibly simple. We should probably spend a, a minute on this. So, to get op note, uh, you raise your hand, you say, Hey, DocBuddy team, I wanna learn more about op node.

I wanna see it, I wanna feel it, I [00:03:00] want pricing on it. Bang, bang, bang. Okay. All that’s, uh, good and, and done and dusted. So you sign, you sign the paperwork, and then we set up your go live with you. There’s a bunch of backend stuff that we handle, like setting up your surgeon’s voice command templates.

Training your staff, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. The the part though that you should pay attention to is that as a part of your launch, as a part of Go live, we actually send one of our account management team on site, uh, for your go live week. Um, Stephanie’s a part of that stellar account management team, obviously.

Uh, so she heard this firsthand, uh, after getting everybody launched and live. And for, for surgeons, you know, this is a matter of minutes. Uh, generally speaking, we’re there just to hold your hand to be sure that, uh, everything goes how you want it to go and that everybody’s comfortable and confident. Um, so anyway, one of the surgeons shared just how impressed they are with op notes, um, and mentioned a [00:04:00] few times that they have never used a platform this good in over 15 years and.

You know what, to make it even sweeter, the surgeon has a, uh, from what I understand, a very impressive background in robotics. So this is somebody that is in touch with the latest and greatest technology, knows what’s gonna work, knows what’s not gonna work, just highly opinionated, and as, as they should be.

And the part that is the, the icing on top, the cherry on top of the icing, maybe. The surgeon said he doesn’t know why this isn’t in every single surgery center. Why isn’t DocBuddy op note being used in every surgery center nationwide? And it’s, uh, kind of fun to get to brag about our team and about our products.

Like that’s, that’s pretty easy to do. Uh, but there’s a more important story to this as well. That op note is something new. Nobody’s seen [00:05:00] this before. Nobody’s ever offered this to the market before. It’s a, uh, you know, we, from our vantage point, we’re creating a category for instant OP report documentation, and there’s a couple other pieces to this as well.

So it’s instant OP reports. It’s a positive revenue cycle impact and it’s eliminating the administrative burden for both surgeons and staff. So, as I pointed out earlier, it’s, it’s really a cure all for all the parts of your OP report supply chain, from starting them to getting ’em signed and then routing them to wherever they need to go.

Uh, but this is so common. We get it in the surgeon’s hands and they go, oh my gosh, how come we haven’t been using this the whole time? And then they tell their friends at other surgery centers. Those surgery centers come to us. And then the cycle repeats where they raise their hand. You know, this is what I said a minute ago.

They raise their hand, they wanna see it, they wanna know how much it costs. They wanna know how hard it is to get up and running. And the good news is seeing it is really quick. Uh, it is, uh, very [00:06:00] affordable that we have a couple models for that, either subscription or per report, uh, modeling. So whatever works better for your facility.

And then getting up and running on it. We provide a white glove service from, uh, folks like Stephanie on our fantastic account management team. So again, uh, that sounds, um, if the, if that sounds too good to be true, reach out to me. We can get you in touch either with this specific account as long as they’re open to it.

Right. We wanna respect people’s privacy. We can get you in touch with this account or any number of our other reference accounts, and you can hear firsthand, uh, from DocBuddy app note users, just how great it is. So with that, let’s take a look at topic two. We’re gonna move on, uh, pretty quickly here because we’re, we’re somehow behind pace at six and a half minutes in.

Hang on just one second. Okay, we’re back. For you and the audience, that would’ve felt like no time has passed at all. I was trying to spare you from hearing me cough and sneeze and clear my throat because I’m still still [00:07:00] working through it. Hopefully you’re staying well at the height of cold and flu season here.

It’s been tough in, uh, in South Florida. Uh, but our second topic revolves around. Cardiac procedures opening up to ASCs, uh, saw a great, uh, piece of news from ASC news.com. Obviously we are gonna share the link with you in the show notes, but their headline is titled Cardiovascular Procedures Opening Up to ASCs, but Expansion Faces, steep Hurdles.

Um, and this story caught my eye because it was something that the friend of the show, Michael McClain and I discussed back in episode 75 titled Growth Factors for ASCs More Can Scale. Different is different. And this is at a time where cardiac procedures or cardiovascular procedures were a super hot topic in ASC news and the, the episode with Michael, we, we, he detailed, I was along for the ride, but he detailed all the things that an ASC would need to do [00:08:00] to be ready for doing these cardio procedures.

Um, and obviously the crux is that more is more. So if you wanna just do more of a case, you’re talking about scale, but if you wanna do something new, you’re talking about different and all of the considerations you would need to make to pull it off. So we’ll link to that episode as well. And then looking ahead, Michael and I actually have a date, uh, set to record here in a, a handful of weeks.

It’s, uh, maybe about a month, month and a half. So it’ll be really high quality content from Michael. As always, we’re looking forward to recording with, uh, with him and his team again. But back to the task at hand, uh, we’re gonna quote a little bit from the article from ASC News here. More cardiovascular or CV procedures are coming to ambulatory surgery centers, but the barrier to entry remains high varied state regulations.

High capital costs and tight staffing are likely to limit the pace of outpatient migration for these cardio procedures. Um, and here’s a quote from, [00:09:00] uh, one of our good friends at ASCA is Kara Newberry. She’s the Chief advocacy Officer with asca. As quoted in a discussion with ASC news, I don’t think we’re gonna see a huge shift in volume in the first couple of years she said.

Um, even so, the regulatory shift that led to the opening of these codes was an advocacy win for ASCA and the industry. Newbury said, for instance, cardiac ablations are performed primarily on older patients. So Medicare coverage is critical to developing the market. I’m gonna pause here from the quote.

Makes sense, right? If the economics don’t work. Why would anybody do it? Continuing with the addition of multiple cardiac ablation codes to the ASC covered procedure list, and that’s the CPL, the opposite of the IPO, the inpatient only list. Um, and these, uh, these codes were added to the CPL uh, in 4 20 26.

Uh, CMS removed a key barrier for existing [00:10:00] specialists and new entrants alike. However, beyond the need for CMS certification and other safety and regulatory prerequisites, building a CV focused facility or converting an office based lab costs a lot of money. Newberry explained those facilities were not going to be built until there was assurance that these procedures were going to be reimbursed by Medicare, she said.

Specifically 86 new cardiovascular codes were added for this year, sorry, 2026, and ASCA advocated directly for more than a dozen of those codes according to background provided by Newberry. Okay, job well done. ASCA team. Uh, all the way from the top. Bill Prentice, um, over to Kara Newberry. It takes a village.

You know, I can’t, I can’t name everybody at asca, but so proud of you guys. Job well done. Look forward to celebrating these wins and many, many other wins at the ASCA annual conference. Coming up in May, I believe, uh, doc, the Doc [00:11:00] Buddy Road show doesn’t begin until about. February where we’ll be joining some of our friends at, uh, the S-C-A-A-L-M and then the surgery partners.

Leadership meeting, and then we roll into asca, uh, where the broader, uh, conventions start in earnest. Um, so anyway, I’m rambling a little bit at this point. If you want more coverage on cardiac procedures in the ASC, grab that episode 75 with Michael McClain. And Michael’s the principal over at Left Coast Healthcare Advisors.

Good friend of doc buddies, if you have, if anything, ills your ASC. Michael’s probably got the cure. And then interestingly, we also have some fantastic cardiovascular procedure content with Dr. Dan Blumenthal. And Dr. Blumenthal is the Chief quality Officer among many other hats he wears at C-V-A-U-S-A.

Um, and if anybody knows about cardiac procedures, it’s gonna be those two. Um, so with that, I wanna give you guys a friendly reminder that [00:12:00] if you’re not subscribed to DocBuddy on. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Get yourself signed up. That way you always get the newest episodes of the show. On behalf of the entire DocBuddy team, I want to thank you for listening, and until next time, I’m your host, Eric.

Have a great weekend, everybody. Take care.