In this episode of Clinician Real Talk, Janie Kinsey shares her journey from the operating room to leadership — and the lessons she’s learned about protecting what matters most in health care: people. Blending a clinician’s heart with an operator’s perspective, Janie explores how ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), team‑based care, and system design can remove friction, restore capacity, and deliver better experiences for both patients and clinicians. She reflects on the tension between idealism and reality, the importance of speaking up to improve care, and how the right support system allows clinicians to focus on what they do best — helping patients get back to the lives they love.
Janie Kinsey’s career has been shaped by the rhythm of the operating room — where teamwork, precision, and patient advocacy come together in high‑stakes moments. Early in her career, she recognized a fundamental truth: clinicians aren’t the problem — the system often is.
In this conversation, she shares how that realization led her into leadership and advocacy work, including national efforts to expand access to ambulatory surgery centers. Janie explains how ASCs improve access, lower costs, and create more patient‑centered experiences, while maintaining the same high standards of quality and safety.
She also reflects on the growing pressures clinicians face today — not just burnout, but a gradual erosion of joy, confidence, and trust — and how thoughtful system design, scale, and support can help reverse that trend. Through real patient stories and firsthand experiences, Janie demonstrates how coordinated teams, simplified operations, and intentional culture can transform outcomes and restore meaning to clinical work.
Episode Overview
Key Topics & Time Stamps
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00:00–03:00 — Introduction & Janie’s OR background
03:00–07:00 — Protecting clinician capacity and purpose
07:00–11:00 — The gap between ideal care and real-world systems
11:00–16:00 — What ASCs are and why they matter
16:00–20:00 — Misconceptions about ASC care and quality
20:00–24:00 — Speaking up, leadership, and frontline change
24:00–28:00 — Advocacy, scale, and influencing care delivery
28:00–33:00 — Reducing administrative burden & partnership models
33:00–37:00 — Patient stories & real-world impact
37:00–40:00 — The future of care: access, outcomes, and clinician support
Episode Highlights
Resources & Links
Take our quiz:
https://lp.optum.com/value-based-care-quiz.html
Optum Care partnership:
https://business.optum.com/en/providers/care-partnerships.html
Resource Library:
https://business.optum.com/en/providers/elevating-clinical-practice.html
ADIA MORRIS: Welcome to Clinician Real Talk, where we trade the highlight reel for the human one. We talk about why you chose medicine, what gets in the way, and what keeps pulling you back. Today's episode is about change, not as a buzzword, but because patients deserve better, and clinicians do too. Our guest, Janie Kinsey, from SCA Health, brings a clinician's heart and an operator's lens. Her journey runs from the OR to leadership, advocacy, and global service. And she still measures success by how quickly patients get back to the lives they love. You'll hear how Optum Scale and SCA's specialty focus create the support, trust, and time to practice without losing yourself. Welcome, Janie. So good to have you.
JANIE KINSEY: Thank you, Adia. It's nice to be here. Thank you.
ADIA MORRIS: Before titles, before we talk about titles and metrics, who are you, as a clinician?
JANIE KINSEY: Sure. At my core, I'm a nurse that's been shaped by the cadence of the operating room. It's about teamwork. It's about patient advocacy. It's about just delivering the result that they showed up for on the day. Surgery is a big experience for a patient. I often tell my teams, this is an everyday thing for us, but it's often the only time that they will experience it. So really recognizing that and showing up in a way that they have a memorable experience and get what they came for.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, wonderful. You said that the OR felt like a perfect mix of teamwork, critical thinking, and tangible impact. And that, step-by-step, it pulled you into leadership so you could strengthen entire teams and centers. So what challenge follows you home these days, the one you can't stop thinking about?
JANIE KINSEY: I think for me, it's how do I protect the humanity and the capacity of the teams in an environment that just makes it harder and harder to do that. There's so much pressure. And to your earlier point, this isn't about buzzwords. So I think burnout's overused a little bit. But it's like, how do we stop that quiet erosion of the confidence and the joy of doing the thing that they want to do, the trust in leadership and in the systems. How do we protect that desire to perform or even the belief that excellence can happen today, that we don't have to wait for things to get right. So when I recognize how hard my team works and what they're striving to do, I just want to do everything I can to remove those obstacles and allow them the opportunity to provide that care.
ADIA MORRIS: Awesome. Just for listeners, SCA Health is a national ASC and practice management partner with 370 plus centers and 4,200 plus physician partners delivering 1.7 million plus cases a year. That scale matters because it sharpens access, outcomes, and cost while keeping clinicians at the center. So most clinicians don't set out to disrupt. We hear that word a lot. They just want to help someone feel better. When did you first feel the gap between the care you imagined and the system around you?
JANIE KINSEY: In my very first role as an operating room nurse. So you come out of school, you're very idealistic. You have this vision of the care you're going to provide and the impact you're going to make on individuals and ultimately the community and the world. And when you get in the environment, you start to realize that there's a lot of things broken about the system. And it's not by design. I mean, it's not intentional. Everyone, like you said, comes in wanting to do the right thing for patients and the experience. But inevitably, in big systems, there's delays. There's scheduling issues. There's scheduling constraints. There's capacity constraints. And often, that leads to lags in time. Patients are waiting too long to have the procedure, et cetera. And so I just found early on, we’ve got to fix the system before we can do it. Does it have to be this hard to provide good care? And that was within a year of coming out of school.
ADIA MORRIS: That's awesome. We mentioned ASCs. So for those that might be newer to the topic, can you explain a little bit about what an ambulatory surgery center, or ASC, is and how it differs from a hospital outpatient department?
JANIE KINSEY: Right. My favorite topic, what is an ASC? So an ambulatory surgery center is designed specifically, it's a freestanding building designed specifically for surgery. So whereas a hospital performs a lot of functions, the surgery center is just for surgery. So it really cuts down on the space, it's a little more homey feeling when you walk in the front door. I've had lots of patients over the years say, this feels like I'm being cared for by my family. And that feels good as a provider to have that. ASCs are important to our health care landscape. In 2023, there were 6,300 Medicare-certified ASCs that provided service to 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries. So it's a really big piece to the puzzle, and I think underlines the impact that ASCs provide to the health care landscape. And when you think about the spend in health care, which I think is on everyone's mind these days, and we think about how much is spent in health care, I think $4.2 billion per year is what Medicare saves by migrating cases to the ambulatory surgery centers setting from the hospital. So they're really a little powerhouse to do outpatient surgical procedures and get patients home the same day and back into their environment, where they can best recuperate and recover and get on with their life as they had planned it.
ADIA MORRIS: You've been clear that ambulatory surgical centers aren't cowboys, meaning they aren’t unregulated or taking only the easy cases. They're highly regulated, quality-driven, and often equal to or better than hospital outpatient departments, with a significantly lower cost to patients and payers. What misconceptions did you confront early on and how did that shape your path?
JANIE KINSEY: I think early on, I sort of went to the ambulatory surgery space for those misconceptions. I was starting my family, so was looking for that balance between my career and my home life and being present to raise my children. So I thought I was going to the easy button, where I could still do surgery, but we worked Monday through Friday, no weekends, no holidays, all the easy cases, the healthy patients. And what I found was much different. So it is an environment that's designed to support that and preserve that craft of surgery that we're all looking for, the teamwork, the efficiency, that patient experience. But it's not just for easy cases and it's not just for patients that pay well. We provide full range of services, from Medicaid to private pay. We do the easy cases. We do lots of ear tubes and carpal tunnels and the easy stuff, but we also do cardiovascular procedures and total joint procedures and spine procedures. So almost every specialty you can find a way that—a surgical specialty, procedural specialty, can find a place to fit in into the ambulatory surgery center space. So it was really that misconception that it isn't just an easy button. It's really an extension or an alternative to that same quality of care, the same reason that we all chose to be clinicians, but in a system that's designed specifically to support that outpatient experience and provide that care experience that both the provider and the patient are looking for.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, awesome. So just some framing. Part of SCA's story is physician-led practice support, management services organization model designed to protect clinical independence while fixing friction points that waste time. That's a different way to change a system. Not louder, just smarter. Change usually starts with one decision, someone making one decision. What was your first small shift that had a big ripple?
JANIE KINSEY: Sure. So when I started in the operating room, there was still a bit of, I was in a rural community and there was still a bit of the perception that physicians were sort of in charge and we all just had to do what they say and fall in line. And I was new. I was the youngest, by far. Most of the people in that operating room could have been my parents, some of them maybe my grandparents. So I was a young kid on the block, and I didn’t know any such parameters, I guess. I didn't know I was supposed to be afraid of the doctors, I guess. So I remember distinctively, one day this physician, total joint surgeon, we're in the operating room and like every day, we're waiting for him between cases, with the patients on the table, ready to go, and there's no physician. And it's like, we're wasting everybody's time here. The patient’s asleep. We're all trying to get on with our day. So he wanders in, in a few minutes. And I was like, oh, it's nice of you to join us today. My nursing colleagues are like, what? You can't talk to them like that. And I was like, but I did. And the thing was, is he was very, really rarely late to the room when I was his circulating nurse going forward. And what I learned is, I wasn't mean about it. It was said in kind of in jest, but enough seriousness that he understood. And what I learned is we're not going to change these things that we all fight every day if nobody says the hard thing, if nobody says the truth. So I just learned early on that you really just have to say what everybody else is thinking, obviously kindly, appropriately, professionally, but be willing to have that hard conversation and confront the thing that needs to change.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, and helping set that expectation of, hey, we expect you to be here on time.
JANIE KINSEY: It's pretty simple.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, it is. But saying it kindly, that's so important.
JANIE KINSEY: Yeah, for sure.
ADIA MORRIS: And you've served on the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association Board, ASCA, to advocate for fair reimbursement and site-of-service migration, so patients can get appropriate care at the right cost. How did advocacy become a part of your clinical practice?
JANIE KINSEY: So for me, the advocacy started long before I got on the ASCA board. In the operating room, I think you learn early on what it means to advocate. So the patients come in, oftentimes are under a general anesthetic, so literally cannot speak for themselves or ensure that they're getting what they came in for. So patients started trusting me, from the day I walked into the operating room, to make good decisions on their behalf and make sure that their wishes, what they signed up for happened in the operating room. So to me, the site of service migration issues, the discrepancy in the way that we are reimbursed compared to other sites of service doing the same procedures was really just an extension of that. So I had gotten to the point where I recognized the limitations to the number of patients that we could serve, either because payers wouldn't acknowledge us as like real players in the space, or because we didn't get reimbursed enough to be able to make it sustainable to do those procedures. And so it's like, what comes next? So the opportunity presented itself for me to sit on the ASCA board. And I'm like, well, there's my chance to make my, use my voice. It’s the same passion, it's the same thing. Instead of one single patient on the table, now at the national level, at that level, when you're using your voice, you're using it for thousands of patients and thousands of providers who are looking to be able to provide that care and that site of service that supports the experience that they're trying to have for themselves and their patients.
ADIA MORRIS: Just a few more things about the organization. SCA's national operations payer strategy and clinical quality programs shoulder the business and administrative load, so clinicians can focus on care. There's also simplified administration from development, contracting, and supply chain. Optum's and SCA's partnership models are built to reduce drag, whether you de novo invest in an existing center or sell a percentage to offload admin. Which pieces of that freed up your time the most?
JANIE KINSEY: It depends on which situation you're in at any given time. So my role at SCA, I support about eight surgery centers across Iowa and Minnesota, and they're all different. So some of them are partnered with a health system. Some of those are partnerships with just SCA and the physicians. Some of them are wholly owned by one of those entities, and we provide management services. So it really depends on the situation, how that support from Optum and SCA impacts the load. So I think, in general, what we what we talk about is health care is local and so we often talk to physicians who are considering partnership with SCA or even our existing partners is, and what they experience, I think, in real time is that administrative burden has gotten greater and greater every year. And they're focused less and less on doing the thing that they signed up to do to begin with, which is provide high quality care to patients. And so we talk about, if we can take this piece from you and do that for you, then you can focus more on that. So I think oftentimes, independent physicians, physicians who are practicing independently, struggle with the reimbursement piece, like having enough scale to have a meaningful conversation with the payers. So that's often very helpful when you have 370 some centers across the U.S. and presence in 30 some states. You have a different conversation with the payers than if you're one surgery center in the middle of Iowa. So I think that's important, a big piece of it. And then having the scalability of benefits and the supply chain alignment and being able to access great purchasing organizations through, I think, just it makes it more affordable and allows them to have a margin that's sustainable for them to keep providing that care into the future.
ADIA MORRIS: Totally. In 2024 alone, 700-plus physicians joined SCA partnerships, scale that amplifies the clinician voice in payer collaboration, which we just kind of mentioned, and value-based transformation. Where have you seen that influence change decisions?
JANIE KINSEY: So one of my favorite things that we do at SCA is the medical executive board. So our physicians, we get a lot of, like, you're just a big company. It's big, corporate America coming in. But what we have partnered with several of our actual practicing physicians across the country, in different specialties, to sit on our medical executive board. And that's a way that we continue to allow the frontline physicians who are practicing medicine every day to continue to have a voice in the care. So that board supports all of our clinical policy and decision making. They review all of the events that we wish had happened differently and make decisions and policies to help prevent them in the future. So when a physician signs on with us, not every, obviously that board can't be every physician, but they have the knowledge of knowing that there are really, real practicing proceduralists at the top of the house helping to drive that policy and make sure their voice is heard. And more recently we've developed, we're working on developing our medical director program to really provide an infrastructure to support medical direction at each individual facility and make sure they have the tie and the support to the medical executive board so they can have those direct physician to physician conversations and make sure that the real practice, what's happening for real in the operating room every day is showing up in our policies and the way that we're performing our clinical care.
ADIA MORRIS: That's awesome. You've said that Optum's and SCA's values aren't just words. They guide decisions at every level. How has that culture shown up for you and your teams?
JANIE KINSEY: Sure. Maybe I'll share the first annual leadership meeting that I attended at SCA. So I had been in other organizations where we talk about clinical quality and make, I hate to say lip service to it, but sometimes it became apparent it wasn't always the primary concern, which is unfortunate and what led me to make a decision to change. And what I noticed at SCA, the first annual leadership meeting, I kind of came in expecting that we were going to talk about budget or how we hadn't met our metrics for the week year, or whatever. And we didn't talk about money one time. Instead, every one of our breakout sessions was about clinical quality and what we could do systemically to drive that quality. And the only time money came up was when we talked about One World Surgery and how much we had raised in donations to support that. And I'm like, wow, where have I landed that we can actually focus on patients and clinical care and what we're doing to impact the world in a better way. So I think that's a great example. And I think over and over, our leaders at every level continue to make decisions that support the values and show that we really do value clinical quality first.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, that's amazing. So let's talk about a patient you still think about. Not because the case was complex, but because the relationship mattered. On your last One World Surgery Brigade, you cared for a woman after a large hernia repair, up walking the next morning, only on acetaminophen, thanking your team for giving her life back. What did that teach you about continuity, trust, and the power of coordinated teams?
JANIE KINSEY: I think what I learned over and over at One World Surgery, and specifically with that patient, is we take for granted all of the resources that we have here in the United States to provide care. And at One World Surgery, it's a great facility and there are many modern techniques and equipment and supplies available for us. But it's not exactly, you may not have the exact brand that you use at home. And physicians and providers, clinicians, we get kind of used to having the things that we like and love and having it available. And there you do it with whatever it is available, and you still do a great procedure for the patient, and they have a good outcome. So that patient on Tylenol, like here in the U.S., that kind of hernia, they probably would have been hospitalized for like three or four days and been on dilaudid, all the things, they would have been on really high-powered pain medications, and still unable or unwilling to get up and walk. And here she is on Tylenol, with this giant incision in her side, and just grateful to have her life back, to be able to go home and cook in her kitchen without that hernia hitting the counter every time that she moves. So it just teaches me that we can do this, we can do this thing, this great care, with a lot less and be happy about it. Sometimes I think we overcomplicate this idea of what it takes to provide great care and great service. So that's what I learn every time I'm in Honduras or in the Dominican Republic at One World Surgery, is just the things that really matter are that human connection and the care and you can make do with the supplies that you have.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, awesome. Can you walk us through a common ambulatory surgery center procedure and explain how the setting helps patients recover more comfortably and efficiently?
JANIE KINSEY: Sure. I'll use my passion project, which is total joints. I've always loved orthopedics. That was my first love in the operating room. When I came to the ASC setting, it was different. We didn't do total joints, we didn't do those higher acuity orthopedic procedures, since we've adopted all of those procedures into the ASC space. And I think total joints is a great example. The first surgeon that I worked with that was doing total joint procedures, reluctantly, I might add, he actually told me, the first conversation I had, I'll never do an outpatient total joint. It won't happen. So we still built the program for him because he was the only one to do them, and he eventually brought the patients. The first one, he comes in at the end of the day. So he had done the surgery in the morning, and this is in the afternoon. So on his way home, he comes by just to check. I think he thought the patient was going to disappear or something. I don't know what he thought. But he comes in like, what do you guys need? What's going on? How can I help? And I'm like, the patient's doing great. She's walking down the hall right now. And he's like, wait, what? So like, six weeks later, I'm sharing how many patients he's done, what the results have been, and he's like, can I just do all of my total joints in the surgery center space? Because it's small scale, like, we're not doing hundreds of these every day. We do enough. I think the most we do in many of our facilities is maybe 12 or 15 in a day. So the patients just get this one-on-one kind of experience with the nurses. The staff is very attentive to them. They have the capacity to be attentive to them, and they don't have to wait for physical therapy to come. I've done this in the hospital setting with people that I love, and it's just like this waiting game. And here, everything is waiting on you, the patient, versus the patient waiting on all of the systems to come to them. So I think that is one great example of how it's just so much better in the ASC, when it's appropriate. Some patients, because of their health conditions, et cetera, need to be done in a hospital setting with all of that extra infrastructure. But when the patient's appropriate, it's just more comfortable. Even if you have to stay overnight, there's usually, at most, two or three patients staying overnight in the surgery center. So there's not the bright lights and the buzzing alarms and all of that activity. They can still get a night's rest and go home to their family the next morning. So I think that's a great example of how the patient experience is just better, in my opinion, in the surgery center space.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, as you've mentioned, in outpatient surgery, the wins are tangible. Joint replacement patients back to gardening, riding, farming, biking, hiking, and the turnaround is fast. That idea of being able to go home that same day or get actual rest overnight, that's incredible. When administration is simplified, clinicians get the space to see the whole person, not just the procedure. Changing gears just a little bit, health care isn't one-size-fits-all, as we know, and multiple models will coexist for a long time. From where you sit, what helps clinicians practice well, regardless of structure?
JANIE KINSEY: I think what helps clinicians practice well is support. Clinicians in training, we're not trained to be business people. We're trained to care for patients. We're trained on sciences, biology, anatomy, chemistry, all of the things that make a body work. And a lot of clinicians, myself included, have gone on to get degrees that support the business side as well. But I think having a system that supports and allows the clinicians to focus on the patient is what makes them successful. And there are ways to do that within every environment within the health care ecosystem. But I think since we're talking about surgery centers today, I think that's one particular area in the health care ecosystem that is designed specifically to eliminate over-administrative burden and that type of thing to really allow clinicians to just take care of patients.
ADIA MORRIS: SCA offers flexible partnership paths, from de novo builds to joint ventures with health systems, so local leaders can choose what fits their patients and practices. How has that flexibility preserved independence while strengthening connection?
JANIE KINSEY: We talked about this a little bit earlier, where each market has a little different dynamic. Some markets are very saturated with health systems, basically employing all physicians. So that presents a much different need than an environment where independent physicians practice. There's a lot of independent physicians practicing. So I think the flexibility of the different ways that we can partner with the physicians really allows us to meet them where they are and what the local market needs demand. So if you're coming into some of our markets where the health systems are just overpowering, then then we learn to partner with the health system. Like, how can we help you? Because health systems are not, traditionally, have not been set up to manage surgery centers. Oftentimes, they want to just run them like hospital outpatient departments. But when the reimbursement is so different, there's that discrepancy, you really have to watch how you build out a surgery center so that you can make it sustainable for the long haul. So I think we've learned how we can come alongside health system partners and provide a service that they're not intuitively ready to provide yet and add to their value proposition. And partner with the local physicians to provide that environment where they, while they may be employed by the health system, they can still have some independent practice within the ASC. Which even in an employment situation or health system partnership, there's still a lot of ways that we can create voice in the decision making for the physicians so they can lead that, the care that they provide.
ADIA MORRIS: Zooming out, Optum's national scale and data connectivity are the backbone that lets SCA do the local work. Payer strategy, value-based specialty care, and cross-division integration that keeps clinician voices strong. That's the difference between feeling alone and being backed by a system built for you. Tell me how you've experienced this.
JANIE KINSEY: I think where that does align, you see that, a really strong cohesion between all of the different divisions, if you will, of Optum, which SCA is clearly one of those. So when we can all work together and provide some continuity for the patient, from the primary care physician to the specialist to the surgery center space, that's all within the same system, that's really nice. And then I think where we see it without that strong Optum physician presence is just bringing to bear the rest of it. Because there's still a lot of options within Optum around data, around different platforms, around revenue cycle that can support those physicians and drive value, regardless if there's a huge presence of actual Optum physicians at any given market. So we've seen that connectivity for our surgery centers, for our partners in many different ways. Usually it's through those platforms, the IT platforms and software options that Optum will provide for them versus—because it just depends on which market you're in. But some of our, on the West Coast and Texas, where there's a large Optum presence, we do see a lot more cohesiveness between SCA and the Optum positions. And we'd love it to be more.
ADIA MORRIS: Of course.
JANIE KINSEY: Of course.
ADIA MORRIS: How does having access to an ASC improve the care coordination you're able to provide for primary care patients?
JANIE KINSEY: Sure. So because the system is smaller, there's sometimes a challenge. Because often, ASCs haven't historically been on an EMR, so that sometimes can provide a bit of a challenge. But on the other side of that, there's the advantage that it's a small system. And I think physicians who work in a surgery center are very keen to the idea that the primary care physician wants to know what happened with their patient. So there's a really concentrated effort to make sure that that follow-up happens. So we work hard to make sure that the [INDISCERNIBLE] gets back to the primary care physician, that the patient's referred back to them for follow-up. So they're not losing sight of their patient. I think sometimes when an independent primary care, or any primary care physician, sees their patient and they send them off for surgery, there's the fear, there's the concern that if I send them into this big system, they're going to get absorbed into the system and I'll never see them again. So I think when coming to an ASC, it's a small space, it's a smaller environment, and there's more control over ensuring that continuum of care happens, that the patient doesn't get lost in the shuffle and that we get them back to their primary care provider. Because specialists don't provide all of that care that the patient needs, ongoing. They come for that specific episode of care. So getting them back in is beneficial to all of us, to make sure that the patient has long-term success with the procedure. So I think that's the advantage, is that it's accessible. I think primary care, like I think about pediatrics as well, like patients that need ear tubes. That can be, depending on your local children's hospital, patients can wait eight or nine months to get their ear tubes. Whereas if you have a surgery center in your local market, referring to those physicians who work at that surgery center, that same patient may only need to wait a week or two to get their ear tubes, which then prevents the long-term side effects of not having ear tubes. Which can lead, can be speech pathology and all of these different long-term side effects of not being able to hear appropriately and what that does to a child. I think that's the real advantage to referring within a system that has the ASC space, is quicker access and then just making sure that your patient doesn't get lost in a big system that's burdened down with those administrative overheads.
ADIA MORRIS: And how does ASC Partnership support the outcomes primary care clinicians are accountable for?
JANIE KINSEY: Unlike the hospitals, which have to take care of every patient that needs care, regardless of whether somebody is having surgery down the hallway today or not, we're able to limit some of that exposure to germs and illnesses that you can't necessarily control within the hospital setting. So because our patients are optimized healthy before they come into the space, infection rates tend to be lower. All complication rates tend to be lower. And again, that's somewhat because of the kind of boutique concierge service feel of an ambulatory surgery center, where every person is focused on that patient right now. So you're eliminating, you're taking a little extra time with crutch training. You can take a little extra time with the discharge instructions and really make sure the patient understands what they need to do to take care of themselves when they get home, which optimizes their outcomes long term.
ADIA MORRIS: Awesome. What do you wish more primary care clinicians understood about the benefits of ASCs?
JANIE KINSEY: I think what we talked about earlier, that we're not cowboys, that we are regulated by the same entities that regulate every other space in health care, that it is a safe place to send your patients. The patient likely will get in faster, have an equal to or better outcome than they would have in any other environment. And we'll send them right back to you for you to continue caring for them long term.
ADIA MORRIS: Can you share a story about maybe a patient that has been through an ASC and then tell us just a little bit more about that, to help those primary care physicians understand.
JANIE KINSEY: Sure. I think one of the stories that sticks with me, she and her husband had been working hard. They were approaching their retirement years and had all these plans and dreams of what they were going to do in retirement. And, unfortunately, she suffered a stroke. It left her really unable to move well. She couldn't speak and articulate her thoughts well and was really looking at a much different future than what they had been dreaming of their whole life. There's traditionally not been a lot of options for patients in that situation. But more recently, vagus nerve stimulation has come up as a treatment that can help the recovery for stroke patients. And that's something that has traditionally been done in the hospital. And recently, through advocacy of ASC, or ASCA and other organizations, that procedure can be safely done in an ambulatory surgery center setting. And SCA worked with one of our partners in one of our markets to help provide that service for that patient. So after the procedure and her recovery, and she started regaining some of her strength and her ability to articulate and speak and talk again, she's now looking at those same hopeful dreams that she had prior to the stroke, thanks to that procedure and in the surgery center space. So I think stories like that just reinforce why we're important. And it's not that that procedure couldn't have been done at a hospital or another site of service, but just the ease of accessibility and that kind of concierge, again, boutique medicine feel of a surgery center that's more personal. We remember that story and remember that patient and take her with us every day.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, that's awesome. If you could describe the value of ASCs in one sentence to a primary care colleague, what would you say?
JANIE KINSEY: Your patient will have the ability to get the procedure done they need to have, in a timely manner, and it won't break their bank account and take away—and harm them financially. I think that's the thing, that it's hopefully the same quality that they get anywhere, but we can do it at a lower cost. And that means their patient has maybe the funds they need to get the medicine they need long term, or something else. So I think that's the one thing, one takeaway for me.
ADIA MORIRS: Awesome. Shifting gears a little bit, how does the integration with Optum's broader care ecosystem help streamline the patient journey into the ASC?
JANIE KINSEY: Well, there's a lot of advantages to being a part of a large organization. Obviously, one of the reasons SCA went public and eventually joined Optum is the capital. In order to grow, you have to be able to build out the system. So I think there's that advantage, which is clearly needed. But on top of that, there's a lot of infrastructure that Optum and that larger organization, even UnitedHealth Group, provides. And whether that's legal services to understand the inevitable conflicts that happen in health care, or if it's from the payer engagement and having that national presence to drive relationships with payers and get reimbursement where it needs to be. I think the data systems help a lot, like having access to understand where there may be redundancies in the system or where there may be opportunity to shift. Maybe it's costing us too much to do this procedure here, and that's a good reason to find a lower cost. I think there's so much access that you can't do individually. And having someone, having a system that can do that for you in the background, again, allows the providers to focus on why they became a provider. They didn't come into this to figure out how to navigate the very complicated payer system within American health care. And they didn't come into this to become IT experts and know how to build out their EMR system. So having those resources that we can bring to bear while still allowing health care to be local, understanding the need in Iowa City, or in St. Paul, Minnesota, or small town America. Having that, being able to do what's right there and have the bigger company kind of back you up and manage some of those very burdensome projects.
ADIA MORRIS: Yeah, awesome. How does the combination of Optum Scale and SCA Health local expertise translate into a better experience for your patients?
JANIE KINSEY: So again, if you have the Optum and SCA sort of in the background, managing your payer contracts, managing your legal issues, managing your risk and compliance, your insurance needs, all of those things, even your employee benefits. That's a huge cost for providers and a worry, like, how to manage that and keep people engaged. So I think having that in the background. And then it allows, I think of the patient who was on vacation with her husband, and they were at the beach and she couldn't go down to the beach. So they're on an anniversary trip. They're supposed to be enjoying each other, but she had gotten to the point where her mobility was just so limited that she had to sit in the car while her husband walked down and took sunset pictures at the beach. So not the life that, again, that she had envisioned. So when we have Optum taking care of some of those things in the background that aren't, I guess, the sexy side of medicine, if you will, then that allows our teams, local teams, to provide the care. So she elected to have both knees done, in two different visits, with one of our local surgery centers. And after that, she talked about just how nice everyone was. And I love that. When we talk about boutique health care, like what does that mean? But for that patient, it meant that every person that she encountered was expecting her to be there. They knew that she was going to be there. They called her by name. They knew why she was there. So she wasn't just a number that was coming in for, of 500 patients today that we're going to take care of. We expected her. The doctor knew who she was and what to expect and what her x-rays said and was ready to care for her in that space. Which is, again, I think why most clinicians become clinicians, is they want to provide that level of care. And when you have that background, that backing to manage the things that are not what clinicians are wanting to do, or even educated to do, it really allows them to focus on the things that matter. So that patient now is baking cookies for her family and planning her next trip to the beach, where she can walk down and take her own sunset pictures. And that's why we do it and why we love what we do.
ADIA MORRIS: What stands out to me is that change didn't require you to lose yourself. It required support, trust, and space. So your purpose could lead, and the system could keep up. So thank you so much for being here, Janie.
JANIE KINSEY: Thank you.
ADIA MORRIS: Thank you for sharing your insights and your knowledge.
[Adia Morris speaking directly to the camera]
If you're listening and wondering whether your current setup still fits, this is your pause and reflect moment. We built a two-minute readiness quiz to help you assess where you are and what support might serve you next. Links in the show notes. And if you're looking for a model that protects your independence, simplifies your workflow, and expands your influence, Optum was built for that. Subscribe to Clinician Real Talk for more conversations like this. We'll see you next time.