Gramercy Surgery Center

Situation

Gramercy Surgery Center, with two locations in New York City, delivers high-quality surgical care in more than 10 specialties. Founded in 2006, Gramercy Surgery Center is the first solely woman-owned and first non-surgeon owned ASC in New York City. The organization’s leadership has a long history of providing cutting-edge technology to its ASCs and associated physicians, which plays a crucial role in supporting Gramercy Surgery Center’s mission built around achieving the highest levels of patient and surgeon satisfaction.

Having two multi-specialty facilities, Gramercy Surgery Center needed a single platform solution that would help the organization to operate both surgical centers as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, and do so without the technology getting in the way. Even though Gramercy Surgery Center had already moved from paper charting to electronic charting with an ASC electronic health record (EHR), the organization’s leadership realized that they needed more and made the decision to transition to SIS Complete™.

Gramercy Surgery Center selected SIS Complete because it delivers ASC management, clinical documentation, patient and physician engagement, communications, and physician mobile capabilities in one comprehensive, cost-effective solution.

“With each ASC software module that we implemented, we have seen significant gains in efficiencies, particularly as it relates to workflows in our clinical workspaces and increased usability and user satisfaction,” said Gramercy Surgery Center CEO Austin Cheng. “We expected this — and much more — when we decided to add SIS Complete, and SIS has exceeded our expectations.”

Solution

SIS Complete is a comprehensive solution to help ASCs run more efficiently and cost-effectively while helping to deliver highquality outcomes. Core modules of SIS Complete include the SIS Office™ ASC management module, which includes scheduling, coding, billing, and revenue cycle; SIS Link™, remote surgeon office case request and communications; SIS Charts™, an ASC clinical documentation module for nursing, anesthesia, and physicians that covers all surgical phases with configurable workflows and concurrent charting; and SIS Exchange™ preop and postop electronic patient questionnaires and communications.

About 40% of the freestanding ASCs in the United States run on SIS solutions, with hundreds of clients running on SIS hosted solutions. This unmatched experience of working with ASCs and implementing thousands of ASC software solutions helped SIS ensure a smooth transition for Gramercy Surgery Center from its previous ASC software to SIS Complete.

“During our kickoff call with the SIS team, we got right to work on our project plan,” said Antony Chang, Gramercy Surgery Center’s director of IT. “This detailed plan took into consideration everything that would be required for implementation success, from the resources we needed to staff training to the timeline with key milestones and finally the target go-live date. If you’ve never experienced the implementation process, I would understand why it may make you nervous. Based on my experience working with the SIS implementation team, this is the team you can rely on to make the implementation process as easy and even enjoyable as possible.”

The highly configurable nature of SIS Complete allowed Gramercy Surgery Center to tailor the solution’s components to the needs and workflows of its ASCs while enabling center-specific documentation and workflow changes.

“There are so many options for how you can configure the templates for each of your specialties, whether it’s podiatry, pain management, and ophthalmology, with cases that tend to be very quick, or orthopedics, ENT, and other specialties that tend to have longer cases with many types of implants and equipment,” said Jeffrey Flynn, Gramercy Surgery Center’s administrator and chief operating officer. “SIS Complete streamlines the template building process and has made documenting cases so more much efficient.” Since SIS Complete is a cloud-based service, it offers advantages over traditional client-server or hosted software.

“With everything hosted by SIS, you can see the cost savings, including the elimination of investing in server infrastructure and allocating a server room to house the hardware,” Chang said. “We also love that since SIS takes care of system updates, we no longer need to worry about coming in early in the morning to complete them on our end.”

“Something we noticed right away when we began using SIS Complete was that it’s faster than our older system,” Chang adds. “It can easily keep up with our clinical workflow.” Jeffrey notes, “We have people with a lot of different technological abilities, but across the board, everybody on our staff was able to quickly use and understand SIS Complete. This extends to our physicians. It takes them less than a few minutes to complete their portion of the documentation.” He continues, “It’s easy to navigate and pull all the information we need together. We’ve seen it improve communication across our departments and between our centers.”

Results

SIS Complete has measurably improved all aspects of Gramercy Surgery Center’s operations, in big ways and small. SIS Link, for example, has saved upwards of 40 hours of data entry per week. The patient registration process only takes 2-3 minutes per patient — down from 8-15 minutes. Surgeons are completing their documentation in as little as 30 seconds, which has helped Gramercy Surgery Center reduce key metrics like days to bill and days to pay.

Then there are those less measurable but still substantial benefits directly associated with SIS Complete. “We no longer experience the level of miscommunication between billing, nursing, and scheduling because we can now access each other’s information and understand how our components work together,” said Flynn.

The more Gramercy Surgery Center uses SIS Complete, the more value the ASCs get from the solution, said Flynn. “As we’re introducing new features, it’s great to see everyone, including our doctors, discovering new parts they appreciate. I feel like we are in the 21st century with this solution.”

As Gramercy Surgery Center continues to grow and build on its years of success, SIS Complete, as a cloud-based solution, scales to support this growth. And Gramercy Surgery Center will continue to benefit from ongoing updates and upgrades to SIS Complete, including those made at the suggestion of Gramercy Surgery Center and other SIS clients.

“SIS Complete is a great solution, but what truly makes it great is the team that supports it,” said Austin Cheng. “They not only ensure that the platform is meeting our needs, but they continue to deliver impressive enhancements. SIS is always responsive to our questions and requests, and we feel they are genuinely invested in our success. SIS Complete has proven to be the right solution for us, and SIS is the right partner.”