Clinical Component

The Ambulatory Surgical Center is owned outright by Gastroenterology Consultants of Savannah. The ASC is located near downtown Savannah and is about 5 miles from both Candler Hospital and St. Joseph’s Medical Center. The ASC operates at 98.5% efficiency and is doing over 8,000 cases a year (700 a month). 72% of the cases done are Colons, 25% are EGDs, so this is a very bread-n-butter practice. And cases that are more advanced will be done in the hospital.

The ASC has 11 exam rooms, 2 Procedure Suites, a scope cleaning room, two infusion chairs, Labs onsite, patient intake and recovery rooms and imaging. The support staff is incredible and includes:

Medical Records Supervisor, & Medical Records team
3 Referral Schedulers
Plus, every physician has their own individual scheduler.
2 general Phone Schedulers that take calls for the whole team and do the scheduling for the APPs.
1 Direct Access coordinator that
1 Patient Financial Counsellor
LabCorp Nurse
Infusion Nurse

The ASC operates on a CRNA only model and does not have supervising anesthesiologist, our physicians are the supervising physicians for that. The ASC always has 2 CRNAs, so it’s easy to always have one available and keep the patient flow consistent.

In the procedure rooms they have Fuji scopes, and we have GI Genius, which is on the screen as in each procedure room and can assist each provider with pointing out polyps. Some of the providers love it, others don’t use it, but it is there if they want it.

Ambulatory Surgical Center Expansion

The current ASC is going to be expanding and they are adding on to essentially double the size of the facility. They purchased the land in May of last year, so it's an acre and a half behind the existing ASC. The current facility is two acres big and then they added another acre and a half behind us.

The architects are working on the design and construction documents now. We're working with the design engineers for all the groundwork and water drainage and all that stuff right now. The plan is to break ground in 9 to 10 months, and looking to have construction complete in 18 months?

GI Consultants is currently doing 700+ procedures a month, but there is no room for additional growth, so the plan is to expand the ASC from two procedure rooms to four and expand the case load up to 1,500 a month. In the new facility, you will walk down a hallway and with all 4 procedure rooms, a new scope area, all new intake and recovery nurse station, new lobby and the current intake and recovery will turn into Fusion admin space or additional exam rooms just depends on the need.