Green Mountain Surgery Center

In July 2019, Green Mountain Surgery Center officially became Vermont’s second independent ambulatory surgery center (ASC). The multispecialty facility in Colchester treated its first patients a few months later and now performs a wide range of procedures in orthopedics, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, plastics, and gynecology. But before the ASC could open and cement itself as a high-quality provider of surgical services, its owners and management team needed to make critical decisions about the direction for the facility. As with any new ASC, one of the most significant choices concerned whether to launch using paper records or invest in electronic documentation.

“We contemplated a number of different ways to open,” said Amy Cooper, CEO of Green Mountain Surgery Center. “Paper records were a consideration because they would be a lower up-front cost and our physicians had poor technology experiences in other settings.”

After careful consideration, ownership and management selected electronic documentation. “While going with paper records may have been easier initially, we would be sacrificing the many benefits of using electronic records,” Cooper said. “We were opening a business in 2019, after all. If we wanted to say we were a cutting-edge facility, we determined that we needed to use cutting-edge technology.”

That also meant choosing a cloud solution, Cooper said. “We knew that being fully in the cloud would provide us with a great opportunity to easily scale up or back when we needed to and without maintaining a significant fixed technology and equipment cost.”

To maximize the value of cloud-based technology, Green Mountain Surgery Center implemented the full suite of cloud solutions — SIS Complete™ — from Surgical Information Systems (SIS). SIS Complete includes SIS Charts™ electronic clinical documentation, SIS Office™ ASC management, and patient and physician communications platforms. “Our administrator and clinical director were familiar with SIS solutions from their time working in other ASCs and were very pleased with the SIS products,” Cooper says. “In addition, our physicians were heavily involved in the vetting of the options we were considering and found SIS Complete impressive. They could see how SIS Complete would allow us to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on vast amounts of data about our business.”

Leading up to the opening of the ASC, the Green Mountain Surgery Center and SIS teams worked closely to ensure patients received not only exceptional surgical outcomes, but also terrific preoperative and postoperative experiences from day one. “We nailed the patient experience,” Cooper said. “We’ve had a lot of surveys coming back from patients stating how impressed they are with how quickly they come into the ASC, are seen by our staff, have their procedure completed, and are on their way home. Patients say that their experience here is faster and smoother than what they’ve experienced in other settings.”

One component of SIS Complete that has supported Green Mountain Surgery Center’s effort to deliver an exceptional patient encounter is SIS Charts Tracker. This module is comprised of patient tracking boards set up in the ASC’s clinical areas (preop and PACU) and waiting room that update as a byproduct of clinical documentation. These boards are used to keep staff and patient family members and friends informed about a patient’s progress through the ASC.

“Our staff always know the real-time status of our patients, which helps keep staff ready and prepared to keep patients moving from one department to the next,” Cooper said. “The boards also provide a great communication tool for our front-desk staff. When family members ask for updates on their loved ones, our staff can provide current information. This has allowed patient’s families to feel very comfortable with how the experience is going.”

To help further reduce the time patients spend at the ASC, Green Mountain Surgery Center has leveraged the SIS Exchange patient portal which enables patients to complete their preoperative questionnaire prior to their day of surgery.

“We’ve seen very strong patient engagement with SIS Exchange,” Cooper said. “They appreciate the convenience of completing the questionnaire on their own time. The use of SIS Exchange also makes the experience at our center much more efficient, helps us conserve valuable nurses’ time, and gets patients in and out faster.”

Getting patients scheduled at the ASC is made easier thanks to SIS Link, a communications platform that enables schedulers at surgeons’ offices to access a personalized view of the ASC schedule, make online case requests, send documents to the ASC electronically, and view the operative note following surgery. “Using SIS Link has been very easy from our ASC’s perspective and the perspective of our physician offices,” said Cooper. “The flow of the offices scheduling their procedures into the ASC through SIS Link has been a great feature. We thought we would need to put more man hours and work into explaining SIS Link and getting the process to work well with the offices. That has definitely not been the case.”

SIS Link also helps streamline communication between Green Mountain Surgery Center and the physician offices, Cooper said. “There’s a lot of patient and case information our physician offices can access in SIS Link, such as insurance cards, consent forms, and other essential documents. Such visibility cuts down on what would likely be numerous calls and faxes between my staff and the offices.”

On the back end, the ASC is using the SIS Office™ module to simplify billing and collections. SIS Office manages key business functions, including scheduling, insurance verification, registration, coding and billing, payment posting, and inventory. “We’re using a third-party billing service,” Cooper said. “Thanks to SIS Office, we’re able to coordinate more effectively with this service and provide it with the documentation necessary to send out timely patient statements.”