Ambulatory Surgery Centers to Perform 60% of US Surgeries by 2020
by James B. Schultz, Executive Vice President Sales & Marketing, ECA Medical Instruments, USA.
Cervical OneTM single-procedure instrument set for securing cervical plates and interbodies. Photo courtesy of ECA Medical Instruments.
Outpatient surgeries are the way of the future. Overall process efficiency, cost savings, simplicity of operations and sterile-packed, surgery-ready instruments and implants are key to market adoption and scalability. The 30-year legacy of high cost of sales, inefficient inventory management and spiraling logistics costs, which hobble OEM implant makers and are passed down to hospitals and ASCs, are no longer sustainable.
OEM implant companies profit and loss statements with their high SG&A charges as percentage of sales and balance sheets carrying depreciating instrument sets (they are never sold with 90%+ being loaners or on consignment) bear witness to the existing high cost of orthopaedic and spine implant products and downstream fulfillment costs making the US the world’s most expensive per capita healthcare system.
Paying over $400 per surgery for shipping costs alone to ferry in & out existing reusable instrument cases and trays is prohibitive, eating deeply into margins. This waste coupled with growing reprocessing costs and carbon footprint woes for both the OEM and end user to handle, clean and re-sterilize these instruments; the chronic spare, repair and re-calibration costs; the risk of surgical site infection, which can add over $28,000 in additional costs per case, and fact only 30% of the instruments prepared for a case are ever used, make the current model archaic. Add to this the delayed procedures or missed surgeries and lost implant sales created by waiting for reusable instrument cases and trays to arrive on site or be delivered from SPD.
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