ASCs can be great investments for physicians. Oh, as long as they are real.

But if all they are are rainbows, unicorns, and clear blue sky, then you’d better stay away.

The problem, of course, is telling the difference.

Hospital systems across the country suffer from bloated fixed costs, huge payrolls, layers and layers of bureaucracy, and management by managers, not by entrepreneurial thinkers.

What appears to the unknowing and unsuspecting to be a normal day-to-day business transaction is really something quite different.

What you think is permanent is only temporary. How temporary is the question.

As more physicians rush to invest in ASCs, unscrupulous facility promoters/managers scheme to separate physician investors from their money.

Driverless Cars And The Impending Death Of Hospitals by Mark F. Weiss

Many people tend to think within professional silos. Barbers cut hair. Farmers farm. And, doctors practice medicine.

Why?

I read a Wall Street Journal article about a company in the gym business that’s expanding beyond the gym business into – yep, you got it – healthcare.

Several years ago, I read a review in a magazine for consultants of a new book by an “expert” who advises that since business now moves at the speed of light, the “old” strategic question of “where do you want to be X years from now?” must now be “where do you want to be a few days from now?”

In the Wild West days of the 1980s and 90s, it wasn’t uncommon to see as many medical directors receiving stipends from a hospital as there are aspirins in a Costco-size bottle.

There were medical directors of this and medical directors of that. All designed, of course, to cement or bond or align (which, in 1990, was a word chiefly applied to automobile wheels) physicians who directly or indirectly referred significant numbers of patients to the hospital.

For years, hospitals have pushed to “align” physicians. Take a ride with Mark as he talks about a reversal in the trend: As what were hospital cases now flow out to independent ASCs, hospitals are begging to be aligned with physicians. But why allow a hospital to be a partner in your ASC deal?