According to Sandy Berreth, administrator of Brainerd Lakes Surgical Center in Baxter, Minn., benchmarking ASC practices can be difficult when national benchmarking data is vague or irrelevant to your facility. "The problem I find with all the national benchmarks is that they don't give us enough information to identify what you're looking at," she says. "You might be looking at other 15,000-square-foot ASCs using three ORs, but what if you're doing all orthopedic cases and another center is doing all eyes or all endoscopy?"
Many ASC benchmarking surveys are divided by category, so an ASC can look at total net revenue for ASCs in a certain part of the United States, or ASCs with a certain number of ORs. The problem comes when a category is broad enough that it includes many ASCs dissimilar to yours. "Benchmarking can be so specific to what a particular facility is doing," she says. "If you're a state with a small population and a small number of ASCs, like Montana, but you're thrown into [the "region" category] with a state like Colorado, which has some of the leading ASCs in the country, it can be impossible to compare."
It makes sense for benchmarking surveys to be structured this way, but Ms. Berreth warns administrators to be careful about taking data to heart. She recommends that administrators look at every possible category their ASC fits into — number of ORs, number of annual cases, geographic region, total net revenue and others — to note how the data differs. If your ASC is similar to the majority of ASCs in your state, perhaps the data based on geographic region is most pertinent for you, for example. If you have a variety of revenue between cases — that is, not all high-revenue cases or low-revenue cases — perhaps you should look at data based on case volume. Looking at a collection of various categories data will prevent you from "taking data to heart" when it may not represent ASCs like yours.
Learn more about Sandy Berreth and Brainerd Lakes Surgical Center.
Read more on benchmarking:
-8 Benchmarking Statistics on ASC Net Revenue and Operating Expense
-12 Benchmarking Statistics About ASC Case Volume
Many ASC benchmarking surveys are divided by category, so an ASC can look at total net revenue for ASCs in a certain part of the United States, or ASCs with a certain number of ORs. The problem comes when a category is broad enough that it includes many ASCs dissimilar to yours. "Benchmarking can be so specific to what a particular facility is doing," she says. "If you're a state with a small population and a small number of ASCs, like Montana, but you're thrown into [the "region" category] with a state like Colorado, which has some of the leading ASCs in the country, it can be impossible to compare."
It makes sense for benchmarking surveys to be structured this way, but Ms. Berreth warns administrators to be careful about taking data to heart. She recommends that administrators look at every possible category their ASC fits into — number of ORs, number of annual cases, geographic region, total net revenue and others — to note how the data differs. If your ASC is similar to the majority of ASCs in your state, perhaps the data based on geographic region is most pertinent for you, for example. If you have a variety of revenue between cases — that is, not all high-revenue cases or low-revenue cases — perhaps you should look at data based on case volume. Looking at a collection of various categories data will prevent you from "taking data to heart" when it may not represent ASCs like yours.
Learn more about Sandy Berreth and Brainerd Lakes Surgical Center.
Read more on benchmarking:
-8 Benchmarking Statistics on ASC Net Revenue and Operating Expense
-12 Benchmarking Statistics About ASC Case Volume