Virtual Advocacy in the Time of COVID-19: Hosting Virtual ASC Tours

In this episode, Charlie Leonard, a member of ASCA’s Public Affairs team, is joined by ASCA’s Manager of Grassroots and Political Affairs Adam Parker and ASCAPAC Board Member and Parkway Surgery Center Administrator Kirsten Anderson for a discussion about hosting virtual facility tours. With many members of Congress curtailing their in-person events and meetings during the pandemic and many ASCs operating under tight new safety constraints, the in-person tours that served as a cornerstone of ASCA’s advocacy for many years are unfeasible today. In response, ASCA has built a new virtual tour program to help ASCA members connect with their members of Congress to educate them about the impact of COVID-19 on their communities.

Transcript

Narrator:   0:06
Welcome to the Advancing Surgical Care Podcast brought to you by ASCA, the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association. ASCA represents the interests of outpatient surgery centers of every specialty and provides advocacy and resources to assist them and delivering safe, high-quality, cost-effective patient care. As with all of ASCA’s communications, please check to make sure you are listening to or viewing our most up-to-date podcasts and announcements.

Charlie Leonard:   0:37
Hello and welcome to the Advancing Surgical Care Podcast. My name is Charlie Leonard. I am a member of the ASCA Public Affairs team and the host of this recording. On this episode of the Advancing Surgical Care Podcast, I am very pleased to be joined by Kirsten Anderson, the administrator of the Parkway Surgery Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and by Adam Parker, ASCA’s manager of Grassroots and Political Affairs. Kirsten is a graduate of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and she earned her master's degree from the Medical University of South Carolina. She has over 25 years of healthcare management and administration experience, and is an active member of ASCA and a member of the ASCAPAC Board of Directors. We've invited Kirsten on today to talk about her experience hosting virtual ASC facility tours with elected officials and their staffs. As most ASCA members know, we strongly encourage members to invite both their member of congress and state representatives for facility tours as a means of improving their awareness and appreciation for the important services we provide. It's not uncommon to presume that because someone was elected to high office that they have a detailed understanding of all or even some parts of our healthcare system. More often than not, though, they don't. Most elected officials have backgrounds in professions and industries outside of healthcare. And once at office, many are required to focus their time and energy on subjects related to their committee assignments, which may or may not involve health policy. I say this not as a criticism but as a fact, I would also say, and I'm sure we will hear more from Kirsten. But most elected officials and their staffs welcome the opportunity to learn more about our issues, especially as they affect their districts and constituencies. For instance, many will be surprised to learn about the volume and breadth of surgeries being performed on an outpatient basis, and for ASCs in particular, they're also often surprised by the value we provide, especially to Medicare patients and the Medicare program. And while we have made very considerable progress over time at raising the level of awareness among our elected officials, the simple fact is that every election brings new faces and the importance of this work never ends. We're also living in a pandemic, and that has presented new challenges for all healthcare providers, including the thousands of professionals working in ASCs, and new challenges for communicating the role and contributions of ASCs. Early on in this pandemic, some health policymakers, both elected and nonelected, proposed suspending all elective surgeries. Some went so far as to suggest that ASCs could be repurposed as hospitals, or that anesthesia equipment could be removed and converted to ventilators. While well-intentioned, it was clear to everyone in the ASC world that these ideas reflected a significant lack of understanding about how ASCs function, who they serve, or how we can be most effective, whether we're in a pandemic or not. So it has always been important for ASCs to engage with their elected officials and state health officials. It is now even more important than ever that we take the initiative to more fully educate and inform the men and women charged with making health policy. And like so many of the prior interactions in our life, we're also finding that it's just safer and smarter and easier to conduct virtual tours with our representatives. And that's where Kirsten and Adam come in, or in the case of this podcast, come on. In the past few weeks, Kirsten and her team at Parkway Surgery Center, using tools and support created by Adam Parker and others at ASCA, have conducted several virtual tours with elected officials and their staffs and she's generously agreed to come on today to tell us about that experience. So, with that introduction, let me welcome Kirsten Anderson and Adam Parker to the Advancing Surgical Care Podcast.

Kirsten Anderson:   4:18
Thank you.

Adam Parker:   4:20
Thanks for having us on, Charlie.

Charlie Leonard:   4:22
Let me start with Kirsten. We are of course eager to hear about the nuts and bolts of getting ready to conduct a virtual tour. But before we get to that, I'm especially interested in hearing about your overall impressions of the experience. Tell us, were your guests engaging? Did you find it fruitful and productive? And do you think the guests maybe left with a better, perhaps even more supportive, view of ASCs?

Kirsten Anderson:   4:44
I will say it was a very positive experience and they were very enthusiastic to participate, which I didn't, I thought they'd never respond and that they were they they found it very easy to participate which I think helped the response, too. The calls were half an hour long and they didn't have to travel to come to our site and it was a lot of information available to them in a short time period, which was helpful and interactive. That was the other thing about having a virtual tour is they could put a name with a face, I could see your center, so I think it was great to have that interact with not just a PowerPoint that you email to them. It was they could see your center, see your face, know who you are, get to know you a little better. You might be reaching out to them already with emails with questions or issues, but I definitely think it was a very positive experience on both sides.

Charlie Leonard:   5:41
Kirsten, that's really encouraging to hear. I might ask you just to go a little bit further to reassure some of the folks who might be a little intimidated or a little unsure of themselves in reaching out to their state representative or their member of Congress. Can you put them a little bit more at ease and explain to them just how easy this process can be and how receptive they can often be on the other end? 

Kirsten Anderson:   6:05
Sure. ASCA was great about assisting with the entire process from the email invitations to congressmen. Once we received an initial response, they made recommendations of how to phrase it about the invite for the call. We did Zoom calls, so that they help with that as well, and they have the PowerPoint outline for each center and they'll help you put that together. The big part of the presentation is that you just have to customize it to your center and put in the video for the virtual tour. So those are the portions of it that you will have to customize for your own center, but you’d want to of course. You know, they asked questions: a lot of questions about COVID and PPE and the CARES Act and federal funding. And in turn, I got to ask questions about upcoming pending legislation. So I learned a lot in the process as well and they did, too, so don't feel intimidated. It's they are reaching out because they want to hear your opinion and where our ASCs are in the healthcare process. And they might be voting on bills that can affect ASCs so it's important for them to hear from us and what really matters to us. And I think the thing we forget in healthcare, same with congressmen sometimes, is they work for us, we voted for them, that we're their constituents. And so they want to hear from us. So I think it's important. And also, they want to learn. A lot of times they're being presented with healthcare information in these bills they know nothing about. So we speak healthcare, they speak politics; so they're gonna ask questions and that's good.

Charlie Leonard:   7:44
That is good. Tell us a little bit about the actual tour once you got online. Were there other people from the facility involved in the presentation and did you take them through a PowerPoint or a video? Could you explain to us practically how it all came about?

Kirsten Anderson:   7:58
Sure. Our facility's clinical manager and our infection control nurse and I were on the call. I tried to get our medical director on there, but it didn't work out timing wise for him to be on the call as well. I think that would have been great for him to be on there as well. And then it was a representative from the staff in one call, and the congressman on his phone. So we did it through a Zoom call; I will say that if you're not already familiar with hosting a call on Zoom, get familiar before that call. It is a little different than just participating in a call. Make sure you can log in, make sure you can get it working. And also make sure you have a computer that has speakers and headphones. I know in the ASCs, a lot of times, we're not on calls all day, so we're not used to that. So make sure you work that out ahead of time.

Charlie Leonard:   8:46
All good advice.

Kirsten Anderson:   8:49
Yeah, I will say for the video, I shot it mostly on a weekend. I had to reshoot it because I did it with my iPhone, but I had to learn to hold the phone horizontally, not vertically. So I did have I was fortunate to have somebody on my staff that's a photography expert so he helped me put together the video, he kind of gave me advice, like, shoot each area separately, then I'll put it all together with the fade outs. And I said, “Okay, great”. And then he helped me put it in the PowerPoint as well. So that was helpful, but I think everybody probably has somebody either in their center or their family or teenagers or somebody that can help them with that portion. Because I'm not that tech savvy, and we figured it out and it actually made a nice presentation. And ASCA does a great job putting most of that together. And if you need help with any portion of it, they'll help you as well.

Charlie Leonard:   9:41
Let me bring Adam in on that if I could. That's all great practical advice. Adam, join us here, if you would, and tell us a little bit about some of the toolkit and some of the materials that you've prepared and sent out to facilities.

Adam Parker:   9:52
Absolutely. In the past, ASCs had materials and toolkits that we use for in-person tours, obviously, that had to be significantly revamped in order to make it as applicable to a virtual tour. And so we've put together a more cohesive toolkit that includes a map of Medicare-certified ASCs across the country so that members of Congress, whether it be in the House or in the Senate, can get a good idea of exactly what the impact and footprint of the ASC industry is. Like Kirsten has said, a lot of these members are not necessarily familiar with the healthcare sphere, much less the ASC industry. So right off the bat, they're able to see that we've included a tour guidebook that will walk members through basically every step of hosting these tours, from the initial outreach that ASCA helps significantly with, to actually planning and then giving the tour, and then finally following up with their members of Congress. The other major crux of the toolkit is the presentation template. ASCA’s staff will go ahead and tailor those to each and every facility tour. But there is a template in there that allows members to go through and see what their presentation will look like. And then finally, there's a "What is an ASC" flyer that gives members of Congress a surface level understanding before they go into their meeting of what the ASC industry is and what it does. There also is a webinar in there that our Government Affairs Assistant Director Steve Selde and I gave that allows members to kind of get training on how this will work before actually doing their tour. But of course, ASCA staff are happy to help at every step of the tour.

Charlie Leonard:   11:40
Kirsten, can you share with us the reactions that you received from both staff and the elected official that you spoke with at the end of the call and what they had to say about ASCs, and what you felt their awareness was, as opposed to when you initiated the conversation?

Kirsten Anderson:   11:56
I had two extremes: one that was pretty involved with healthcare, but asked a lot of questions, and then the other was just coming on a committee for healthcare in that congressman's office. But I think in both cases they really liked the personal experience of what's going on right now. And they asked a lot of questions about that, because that part, they had no idea about how an ASC is functioning right now in the pandemic situation so I think it was great for both congressmen and their staff to hear what we're doing. So I think moving forward, we'll just continue reaching out back and forth and having those conversations about things that are going on, and they have questions they know now that I'll be glad to answer them and help them and vice versa. So I mean, that's really what it's about is building that communication.

Charlie Leonard:   12:47
That's exactly the relationship we're after. Adam, I'll give you a final word here. What would you say to a member who wants to go ahead and start the tour, but still feels like they need some additional help—where can they turn?

Adam Parker:   12:59
Yeah, I mean, we've talked a lot about how it can be sort of daunting to approach this at first, but I think, hopefully, both the support that ASCA staff provides and then the toolkit itself will make it a bit more approachable. I'd encourage members that are interested in hosting a tour to go ahead and search through the toolkit that's online on ASCA's site on the "Host a Facility Tour" tab. But I'd also encourage members to go ahead and just reach out to me if they have questions or want to talk through exactly what their experience will look like before actually going ahead and committing to hosting a tour.

Charlie Leonard:   13:35
Okay, this will conclude our discussion today. I'd like to thank Kirsten Anderson and Adam Parker for coming on the Advancing Surgical Care Podcast and for sharing their knowledge and experiences with us. As always, if anyone listening has thoughts or suggestions for future topics or how we might improve these presentations, please do not hesitate to send us your thoughts and recommendations. We want to hear from you so that we can serve you better. Thanks for listening and please stay safe and stay healthy.