With elective surgeries on hold, general surgeons are watching as their elective cases build after each passing day. As the path of COVID-19 courses through its paces, predictive models anticipate exiting the worst of the pandemic by early summer. For us, that means our general surgeon colleagues in the communities where we work and live will start to work down their backlog of elective surgeries. In parallel they will ramp up their clinics and start adding referred cases. They want nothing more than to get back to work to recoup lost revenue and care for their patients who have been patiently waiting for their rescheduled surgery. For them, getting back to work will not be a cake walk. After losing months of revenue and referrals and a mounting backlog, many are dreading the workload, especially when they heap on their on-call duties.
As a service-minded organization, we continue to see substantial interest in our model and growth. In the near future, our outreach with hospital leaders around the country will focus on education of how our model where surgicalists available 24/7 for emergent, urgent, and trauma surgical services may be a productive alternative to their current on-call model. Being proactive will help community hospitals be ready for the surge that is surely coming. Likewise, we are actively involved in discussions with the healthcare leaders in our communities to learn about how we can help further, understanding that this is a constantly-evolving environment. We are here to help.
We’ll look back on this challenging time and see an organization that is stronger than ever before.
