This Week in Surgery Centers

Here's what to expect on this week's episode. 🎙️ Dr. Brian Cohen, practicing anesthesiologist and founding member and administrative chief of Moss Anesthesia Group, and Lee Kortmansky, Site Administrator at Physician Outpatient Surgery Center, join Grant Duncan to discuss one of the biggest issues facing ASCs right now: anesthesia subsidies and coverage. They break down how anesthesia costs often...

Eric Gonzales and Alexandra DeHart are healthcare banking leaders at Columbia Bank, where they work with healthcare organizations on financing, growth, and capital planning. Eric and Alexandra join us this week to break down how ASC leaders should think about funding growth. They walk through the key differences between debt and equity, what ownership and control trade-offs come with each path, an...

Quality data can be one of the most powerful tools an ASC has to improve both safety and operations. In this episode, Nina Goins, Executive Director of the ASC Quality Collaboration, explains how centers can use benchmarking data to uncover deeper operational issues, strengthen payer and board conversations, and build a stronger culture of quality. She also shares why measures like wrong-site even...

Sean Hartzell is a Managing Director at VMG Health, where he advises healthcare organizations on strategy and capital planning. Sean joins us this week to break down how ASC leaders should think about funding growth. He walks through the key differences between debt and equity, how to calculate the “true” cost of major investments beyond the upfront price, and what factors can make or break a new...

Jon Vick is the Founder and Principal of ASC Realty Advisors, where he has spent decades advising physicians and ASC operators on healthcare real estate strategy. Jon joins us this week to explain how ASC sale-leasebacks work and why they are becoming an increasingly relevant strategy for physician owners. He walks through how centers can use sale-leasebacks to fund de novo projects, expansions, a...

Stephanie Tarry brings more than three decades of experience in the ASC industry. Now with Physician Transaction Advisors, she works closely with physician groups to evaluate partnership opportunities and guide them through the transaction process from start to finish. In this episode, she breaks down how ASC transactions actually unfold, from early readiness and confidential information...

Dr. Leo Spector, MD, MBA, is the CEO of OrthoCarolina, where he leads strategy across a growing network of ASCs while continuing to practice as a spine surgeon. With decades of experience navigating joint ventures and certificate-of-need restrictions, Dr. Spector brings a physician-leader perspective on what it takes to successfully own and operate ASCs today. In this episode, he shares OrthoCarol...

Jim Freund is the Managing Partner at Physician Transaction Advisors, where he and his team have spent more than 20 years advising physician-owned surgery centers through transactions, partnerships, and long-term strategic planning. Having worked on hundreds of ASC deals across the country, Jim brings a unique perspective on what drives centers to explore a transaction and how leaders can prepare...

Anesthesia costs and staffing pressures are reshaping ASC operations. In this episode, Garrison Gordon and Cory Hollmann break down shifting reimbursement, rising subsidies, and evolving partnership models between surgery centers and anesthesia groups. Learn practical strategies to align incentives, improve collections, manage risk, and build sustainable anesthesia relationships that sup...

Patient payments are getting messier — not always because patients won’t pay, but because the workflow is full of friction, surprises, and missed follow-through. In this episode, HST experts talk about what really works for top-performing ASCs: clearer upfront estimates, fewer handoffs, easier ways to pay, and the operational fixes that keep small balances from quietly aging into “never gets paid....

Patient payments don’t have to be complicated. In this week's episode, we kick off our Patient Payments series with a practical guest conversation on what “good” looks like in 2026: integrated processing, fewer manual steps, faster reconciliation, and an easier way for patients to pay. We cover where workflows commonly break down, why manual reconciliation and disconnected tools create errors and...

If you’ve been looking for a clear, ASC-focused breakdown of the 2026 CMS final payment rule, this episode is for you. This week, ASCA’s Chief Advocacy Officer, Kara Newbury, joins us to break down the most important things ASC leaders should note coming out of the 1600+ page document (all in under half an hour). Kara takes us through the reimbursement rate, the weight scalar update and ASCA’s adv...

If you only had time to do one thing this week to improve your surgery center, what should it be?  To kick off the countdown to year-end, This Week in Surgery Centers pulls together a year’s worth of conversations into one rapid-fire episode, featuring input from 30 past guests on the closing question of every interview: what is one thing ASC leaders can do this week to improve their surgery...

In the third installment of our case costing series, HST Pathways’ Chief Innovation Officer, Gavin Fabian, breaks down what “mature” case costing actually looks like in a real ASC (and why, done right, it’s pretty boring). The conversation covers why so many initiatives fall apart at the cost-data level, how to clean up your item master and documentation workflows, and practical steps to move from...

In this week’s episode, the second installment in our case costing series, Grant Duncan sits down with VMG Health’s Vanessa Sindell and Nancy Stephens to unpack the unsung hero of accurate case costing: a clean inventory master. They cover practical, do-it-today tactics like using naming conventions that work at the point of care, leveraging GPO data to understand all of your pricing opt...

This week’s guest, Melissa Rice, is the administrator at Loyola Ambulatory Surgery Center at Oakbrook Terrace (part of Trinity Health), and the newly elected Illinois Ambulatory Surgery Center Association President. In the first episode of our Case Costing series, Melissa lays out a practical playbook that changes behavior — how to pull the levers that drive profitability (implants, supp...

Recorded live at the New York State Association of Ambulatory Surgery Centers conference in Albany, NY (Oct 6-8), this special edition episode brings three vantage points on where ambulatory surgery is headed next: Dr. Daniel Choi of Spine Medicine & Surgery of Long Island on scaling a multi-physician practice with 10,000+ annual visits and what it really takes to plan an ASC; JoAnn Vecchio of...

This week, Will Evans, Head of Data Science & Insights at HST Pathways, joins us to unpack our new five-and-a-half-year look at how case volume, OR minutes, and dollars are distributed across patient demographics. We discuss the biggest findings, a few surprises, and the simple metrics any ASC can track to anticipate scheduling and staffing nuance by population. In our news segment, we cover v...

In this episode, Benita Tapia, Administrator & Director of Nursing at Beverly Hills ASC, joins Alex — along with Conor McGinn, CEO of Akara — to unpack how she’s using AI to improve everyday operations: tightening block utilization and surgeon accountability, speeding turnovers, answering scheduling questions in real time, and boosting registration accuracy to cut preventable denials. We also...

As Q3 wraps, this episode spotlights the signals that matter for ASC leaders heading into the busiest quarter of the year. We track policy direction, the continued shift of cases to outpatient settings, and how employer data transparency is accelerating site-of-care redirection. We scan market momentum and partnerships, revisit anesthesia coverage and how centers are adapting, and share pragmatic...

For the final episode of our Improving the Patient Experience series, show co-host Grant Duncan and Marta Shultz, a clinical workflow expert at HST Pathways, join Alex to unpack pre-assessments — why they’re essential for patient safety and satisfaction, when to complete them, how many forms you actually need, and practical ways ASC leaders can reduce nurse phone time and cut cancellations and del...

Jeffrey Flynn, Administrator and Chief Operating Officer at Gramercy Surgery Center and President of the New York State Association of Ambulatory Surgery Centers, joins the show to share how Gramercy keeps care personal at scale — training every team member as a patient advocate, keeping families informed, and even empowering nurses to call a case when something feels off. He also gives us insight...

In this episode, Grant Duncan sits down with Katie Sypher, a registered dietitian and healthcare operations leader, and Michael McClain, founder of LeftCoast Healthcare Advisors, to tackle one of the most overlooked challenges in the ASC space: communication. They share practical strategies for aligning messaging between clinics, surgery centers, and patients — covering everything from mapping tou...

Colleen Ramirez, Chief Administrative Officer at Bone & Joint Surgery Center of Novi, and Dr. Michael Bernard, Director of Anesthesia, join the show to share how they work together to drive case volume, choose which cases to accept, and stay profitable—all while maintaining a strong clinical partnership. In our news recap, we’ll cover the first ever ASC in the Dominican Republic, a new ASC joi...

This week, we’re joined by Wes Battiste, an experienced anesthesiologist and ASC developer, to talk about a growing trend: surgery centers building their own in-house anesthesia teams. What once seemed like a wild idea is now becoming the best path forward for centers looking to stay profitable. Then, in our Data & Insights segment, we dive into 10 key metrics from spine centers—some promising...