Slicing Skin, Slicing Costs: Surgery Centers Position Themselves as Low-Cost Option

John Aguilar
Daily Camera

LOUISVILLE — Dr. Tom Mann reaches with a gloved finger into the incision he’s made and rummages around inside his patient’s forearm, searching for the end of a torn tendon.

He finds it, pulls it out and examines it under the bright, surgical lights — a limp, sinewy string decorated with blobs of scar tissue.

Within 90 minutes, he’ll clean up the tendon, reattach it to the bicep, stitch up the arm, wake up the patient and send him on his way — all for about a third of what it would cost in a hospital.

Mann’s effort is one of 3,000 procedures that surgeons at the 4-year-old Flatirons Surgery Center in Louisville will perform this year.

“Why are we performing these kinds of outpatient procedures in a hospital setting when we can do it here for a fraction of the cost?” said Bettie Fimbrez, a registered nurse and the administrator at Flatirons.

Advocates of ambulatory surgery centers, such as the one Fimbrez heads, say the centers are helping to put a brake on spiraling health-care costs in the United States by doing routine, same-day surgeries — like shoulder reconstruction, spine injections and ligament reconstruction — without the overhead and bureaucracy of a hospital.…
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