Austin F. Cheng is Chief Executive Officer of Gramercy Surgery Center, which operates two independent ambulatory surgery centers in New York City. His mother founded the business as the first wholly woman-owned, non-surgeon-owned multi-specialty surgery center in New York and ran it for 20 years. Cheng was an Army JAG attorney and had only planned to take over the centers for a few weeks before COVID-19 closed the country.

Cheng sees a market that finally understands what ASCs offer. COVID taught patients to ask about their options for where to have a procedure, and payers and self-funded employers have since started steering volume outpatient.

His take? ASCs should present themselves as added capacity for the healthcare system: another access point for patients, a lower total cost of care, and a way for physicians to stay independent. He thinks ASC leaders make that case far less often than they should.

Allison Stock has spent 20 years in ambulatory surgery centers in nearly every role. A nurse by background, she moved from bedside to nursing director to administrator, and now serves as Chief Operations Officer at Surgical Management Professionals, where she helps independent physicians build fully functioning surgery centers from the ground up.

Her read on the market is that the centers pulling ahead are not the ones with the newest equipment. They are the ones treating operational excellence, culture, and relationships as strategy rather than overhead.

Her take? In her view, the greatest opportunity in the space is helping independent physicians maintain a genuine voice in how their centers are run. When physicians can weigh in on what supplies are used and how cases are scheduled, they stay invested. When that voice disappears, so does the motivation that makes an ASC impactful.

Dr. Jeffrey Roh has built his career at the leading edge of where surgery is heading. An orthopedic spine surgeon who trained in the Midwest, he now serves as Chief Medical Officer at Excel Health, where he is growing a surgery center business across Honolulu and Southern California.

Over the last few years he has observed a transformational shift in elective spine care procedures as they move into ambulatory surgery center settings, driven first and foremost, in his opinion, by patient preference.

His take? The move to outpatient is not only economical, it is safe. For well informed patients, the choice between a large open procedure with a multi-day hospital stay and a same day procedure through an incision the size of a pencil eraser is not much of a choice at all.

As ambulatory surgery centers take on higher-acuity cases and more complex procedures, monitoring decisions are becoming long-term infrastructure decisions. Medtronic acute care and monitoring's expanded collaboration with Mindray North America extends a long-standing hospital relationship into ambulatory surgery, integrating advanced monitoring technologies onto a single platform.

Their approach? Integrate industry-leading Medtronic parameters directly into Mindray's patient monitoring platforms as they are installed, so ASCs can open and operate as though they were in the hospital. The platform is modular and plug and play, letting centers activate only the technologies that fit their case mix and add parameters over time as complexity grows.

Behind every seamless ASC operation is an invisible network of coordination. For Cardinal Health and Medtronic, that network runs on weekly supply chain meetings, monthly performance scorecards, and a shared commitment to making complexity disappear for ASC leaders.

Their approach? Strategic collaboration that addresses 70% of an ASC's formulary while maintaining elevated inventory levels and weekly touchpoints between teams—so problems get solved before ASCs even know they exist.

When Dr. Adam Thaler became Medical Director at Summit Health's ASC three years ago, he faced a reality every ASC anesthesiologist knows: managing complex airways without the safety net of a hospital's backup resources.

His solution? Making video laryngoscopy the standard for every intubation—not just difficult airways. Every. Single. One.