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FeedSurging Surgicenters
You don’t always need a hospital for surgery. Ambulatory surgery centers are increasing in the state—and increasing the benefit to doctors and patients.
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An hour before he was scheduled to see patients at The Bayhealth Wound Care Center, Dr. Thomas P. Barnett was busy performing back-to-back procedures four blocks away at his surgery center at Eden Hill Medical Center in Dover.
The procedures—a breast biopsy and the drainage of a perirectal ulcer—went off without a hitch, so Barnett was able to start his hospital rounds promptly at 8 a.m.
Barnett credits the efficiency of the ambulatory surgery center with letting him maintain a schedule that can respond to a patient at a moment’s notice. “The one patient had come to see me the day before, and I put him on the schedule for the next morning,” says Barnett, one of 34 physicians who own the Delaware Surgery Center. “I never could have done that at the hospital.”
Ambulatory surgery centers have become the preferred choice of doctors for outpatient surgeries. Since the first one opened in 1970, they have emerged as a national healthcare phenomenon. Today about 22 million procedures are performed each year at more than 5,000 facilities across the United States. They’ve increased in Delaware, as well. Advances in surgical techniques and anesthesia have helped drive the growth.
“Thirty years ago patients were admitted to the hospital for a colonoscopy, and it was a one- or two-day procedure,” says Dr. Harry J. Anagnostakos, a gastroenterologist who last year sold his endoscopy center to Beebe Medical Center in Lewes. “Now patients are in and out in an hour and a half.”
Surgeons are attracted to ambulatory surgery centers because they better allow them to control their time and working environment. Twenty-two of the 24 free-standing surgery centers in Delaware are physician-owned.
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