Moving Beyond Surgeon Preference: Consolidating IONM Providers

a businesswoman chats with a doctor as they leave a boardroom meeting in a hospital

How much a hospital spends on surgical supplies and staffing depends largely on its physicians, who drive 75-85% of all quality and cost decisions. Much like the selection of surgical supplies, the choice of intraoperative neuromonitoring (IONM) providers has traditionally been left to the surgeons. As a result, it’s not uncommon to have three or more IONM providers supporting different surgeons within the same hospital.

Unfortunately, this often leads to unnecessarily high managerial costs resulting from complex billing and scheduling, inconsistent quality management and reporting, and chronic staffing challenges. While many non-consolidated, multi-provider environments originate from surgeon preference, they can actually have a negative impact on surgeon satisfaction. Consolidating providers is an attractive solution, but consolidation cannot be accomplished without surgeon buy-in, and that requires careful planning and coordination.

Our free field guide to gaining surgeon buy-in for IONM provider consolidation goes beyond the theoretical frameworks for engaging physicians. It provides concrete tactics, a comparison worksheet, and talking points to drive useful conversations with surgeons about IONM providers. Recognizing that each OR environment is unique, the field guide provides best practices to help you evaluate your current providers and create a strategy and a communication plan for your specific surgeons and your hospital’s needs.

A surgeon’s trust in their neuromonitoring provider is built over time, which can make a physician resist to the prospect of change. But, with careful preparation and skillful facilitation, surgeons will welcome the opportunity to evaluate and select the IONM provider best equipped to help drive value and patient outcomes. Ultimately, surgeons want a skilled and competent OR team that helps them do their best work, and they will embrace the shared purpose of improving quality, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs through consolidation.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IONM

###

Download our new field guide, “Moving Beyond Surgeon Preference” to learn how to create a strategy for successful IONM vendor consolidation.

SpecialtyCare

Over 13,500 physicians in more than 1,100 hospitals trust SpecialtyCare to help them achieve exceptional care outcomes, regulatory compliance, and financial results. With more than 1,800 associates supporting almost 400,000 procedures annually, we maintain SCOPE, the SpecialtyCare Operative Procedural Registry®, which is used to define standards, determine benchmarks, establish best practices, foster innovation, and identify opportunities to reduce clinical variation that result in improved patient outcomes, increased efficiencies, and minimized costs. We are accredited and certified by The Joint Commission. By developing expertise beyond industry requirements, our customers can be certain they have the best partner for clinical excellence in perfusion, ECMO, autotransfusion, patient blood management, intraoperative neuromonitoring, deep brain stimulation, surgical assist, minimally invasive surgical support, and sterile processing consulting.