The Setup

The network – a joint venture between a regional health system and a national ASC management partner – has scaled its DocBuddy Op Note rollout from an initial handful of pilot sites to 12 centers across its footprint. To measure impact, the network tracks a rolling average of days-to-bill at each center and compares the same month year-over-year, which cancels out normal seasonal swings in case volume.

The Numbers

*Network average is the simple average of all 12 centers’ rolling-average days-to-bill; per-center changes range from −53.3% to −91.9%, averaging −76.2%.

Facility names and the joint-venture partner have been anonymized at the client’s request. Figures are drawn from the client’s internal revenue cycle reporting, comparing rolling-average days-to-bill for June 2025 and June 2026 at each of the network’s 12 DocBuddy Op Note sites.

The Real Story: Convergence, Not Just Speed

The headline number is strong on its own – every one of the 12 centers cut its days-to-bill!  

But the more interesting pattern is what happened to the spread between centers…

Pre-DocBuddy, the 12 centers were all over the map: some were already billing in under 5 days, one was averaging over a month. That’s a 30-day gap between the network’s best- and worst-performing site – the kind of inconsistency that makes revenue forecasting and staffing genuinely hard to plan around.

Post-DocBuddy, every center – regardless of where it started – landed in a tight band between 1.66 and 2.82 days. A site that had been averaging 33.8 days to bill converged to almost exactly the same billing speed as a site that had already been a relatively strong performer at 4–5 days.

The technology didn’t just make things faster; it made the network’s billing performance predictable, site to site.

That’s the harder problem to solve with process fixes or staffing alone – and it’s the one that matters most to a JV’s finance committee trying to forecast cash flow across a growing multi-site portfolio.

Why It Happened

Removing the transcription step removes the single biggest source of variability in how long a report takes to finalize – a fast transcriptionist versus a backlogged one, a clean dictation versus one full of blanks that bounces back to the surgeon. DocBuddy Op Note puts report generation and sign-off entirely in the surgeon’s hands at the point of care, so the time-to-bill stops depending on factors outside the center’s control. That’s consistent with why the sites with the worst, most variable starting points saw the largest gains – they had the most bottleneck to remove.

The Takeaway

Twelve centers, twelve different starting points, one consistent outcome. For a network scaling a JV across multiple states and markets, that kind of predictability – not just a faster average, but a tighter one – is what turns a good pilot into a network-wide standard.

See what DocBuddy Op Note will do for your surgery center’s revenue cycle. Request a demo →