Dr. Richard Nahas Shares Helpful Tips for Choosing a Surgery Center
According to Dr. Richard Nahas, planning surgeries can be challenging. After you’ve prepared to go through the surgery, you need to decide on a great surgeon. Finally, you need to do a lot of research and find out where you can have the surgery.
Let’s check out a few helpful tips for choosing a surgery centre.
Tips & Tricks
- Your surgeon chooses it – If you’ve already chosen a great surgeon for your procedure, he or she would affect the location of the surgery dramatically. You’ll be limited by where your surgeon has surgery privileges. That can range from a few surgical centres to surgical centres and multiple hospitals. So, if you’ve already decided on a great surgeon, ask him or her for locations where they have surgery privileges and proceed to narrow down your options.
- Quality measure comparison – Once you have a list of surgery centres and hospitals, a quick internet search would provide you with a lot of data on each facility. You’ll get quality measures for each facility in the form of infection rates, mortality rates, and the total number of medical mistakes that have been committed at the facility. A quick analysis with that data would allow you to pick at least five options that have higher average scores than the rest.
- Get the most out of your insurance policy – While you research the best surgery centre, you need to be practical about your finances. Your insurance policy will have a significant effect on your choice. If the surgery centre you’ve chosen is part of the insurer’s network, most of the medical expenses would be reimbursed. If the surgery centre is “out of network” for the insurer, the cover would be significantly less, and you’ll have to pay the big difference out of pocket.
Sometimes, you need to be more thorough with surgery centres. For instance, a surgery centre may be “in-network” for your insurer. However, if the anaesthesia providers were “out of network”, you’ll be surprised by an expensive bill at the end of the procedure. When you choose a surgery centre, call your insurer and make sure that apart from the surgery centre, the anaesthesia provider and the surgeon are covered by their network.
- Choose a facility where the surgical procedure you need is done frequently – You don’t want to be an expert or a statistic for the surgery centre. You need to make sure that you aren’t one of the first few ones who’s going through that kind of procedure at the chosen surgery centre. Risks increase when the surgeon and anesthesiologist haven’t performed that procedure at this facility and are less familiar with the facility and its staff. For instance, if you’ll get a hysterectomy, choose a surgery centre that performs a lot of hysterectomies.
Conclusion
Dr. Richard Nahas suggests that you use the above-mentioned tips for narrowing down your options. Make sure that your insurance policy covers most of the cost for the surgery centre you choose, and the facility should have done your procedure frequently.
