The Business of Surgery Managing the costs of procedures with implants continues to be a juggling act for OR directors and business managers. Total joint replacements, once profitable, have seen prices climb while Medicare reimbursement slides. Some spinal procedures still have a positive margin because the surgery is more often performed in younger patients…
Spinal surgery is a costly specialty that strains OR budgets. The wide variation in techniques and costly technology make it difficult to manage. Challenges go beyond rods and screws. An array of biologics, such as bone morphogenic protein (BMP) and demineralized bone matrix (DBM) can add thousands of dollars to…
Health care facilities like other businesses face tough economic headwinds. Tightening credit, plummeting investment values, and the prospect of less philanthropic giving make for a difficult financial climate. There's also likely to be more uncompensated care as unemployment rises, and state Medicaid programs cut back. OR directors and business managers,…
For the first time in the US, surgeons at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/ Columbia University Medical Center in July removed a woman's gallbladder without any external incisions. Using the technique called NOTES (natural-orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery), a team of surgeons led by Marc Bessler, MD, inserted a flexible endoscope into the…
For the first time, the government has issued a favorable ruling on a spinalfusion surgery gainsharing arrangement between a hospital and physicians. In the ruling, issued July 31, the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) explains why it won't impose sanctions for the arrangement, which could potentially…
The community turned out to help sandbag at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As Mercy Medical Center's OR nurses were readying their patients for their 7:30 am cases on June 12, the Cedar River, some 10 blocks away, was edging dangerously close to the top of its banks.…
Radio frequency identification systems (RFID) have the potential to cause critical patient equipment to malfunction, Dutch researchers report in the June 25 JAMA The researchers tested 2 types of RFID systems in a nonclinical setting with 41 medical devices such as external pacemakers, ventilators, infusion pumps, and anesthesia devices. There…
Attending conferences is all about building bridges to transfer ideas from the conference into clinical practice. That's why San Francisco, the city with the Golden Gate Bridge, was a fitting site for the 2008 OR Business Management Conference, a meeting filled with ideas for OR leaders. The 300 attendees chose…
You've had a value analysis program for a number of years. You think it might have run its course. What's next? Value analysis, which has been in the forefront of supply chain management for years, is a systematic process for making purchasing decisions and identifying savings opportunities that consider not…
With no margin for error in the operating room supply chain, the cost of obtaining the right products in the right quantities can easily get out of hand. While product prices can be somewhat regulated by contract, in an emergency, there is little point in quibbling over freight charges for…
