There is no doubt that this continues to be a challenging time in anesthesia. Teams across not only NorthStar’s footprint but industry-wide continue to endure chronic staffing shortages, increased labor costs, and variable OR volumes. Additionally, despite our continued advancements in clinical quality and patient safety, our capacity to successfully negotiate with third-party payors has been severely restricted through the passage and implementation of the No Surprises Billing Act. This creates a difficult scenario where we have limited options and must negotiate increased stipends from our hospital and ASC partners, who are also managing through a challenging time and seeing negative operating margins for the first time in many years.
Despite all this, I am proud to say that NorthStar remains strong, due in large part to our resilience in anticipating change, our principled growth across 2022, and our collective effort in delivering high-quality, patient-centered care. Furthermore, we were able to secure over $28M from our partners that went directly towards compensation increases at many of our facilities and dialed in on our own operating efficiency to reduce overhead costs by $8.5M.
We are also uniquely positioned in the industry to withstand these headwinds, given our commitment to the delivery of excellent patient care and our long-term focus on partnership with our clients. One of our strengths continues to be our care team approach enabled by the highly skilled clinicians we attract and retain.
The lifetime value NorthStar delivers to its clinicians and the patients they care for is not just for the next several years, but the long term.
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