Editor’s Page: Never Boring

When Elizabeth “Betsy” Dovec, bariatric surgeon and subject of this month’s cover story, gave me some of the details on what she’d invested to build the single-specialty surgery center she plans to open in early 2025, my heartbeat quickened and my palms started to sweat.

I’ve spoken with facility leaders who lost sleep over a new build or an expansion they had no financial stake in, so I can only imagine the stress involved in building your own surgery center.

Even thinking about the pressure she was under brought me back to the very brief period just before my second — and thanks to the outstanding work of urologist Dr. Belkoff, final — child was born.

During that time, my wife and I had purchased a new, more spacious home before our current residence was officially sold, saddling ourselves with two mortgages until we could unload our former abode. We had a prospective buyer and a complicated contingency deal in place, but a lot of things had to go in our favor for the logistics to work out.

SAY WHAT? My then one-year-old daughter and her Boston Terrier sidekick Judith Weiland moments before being rushed out of our home to accommodate another showing.

Quick aside about the Bilski’s house-selling days: Most weekends during that timeframe our realtor would call a handful of times and say something like, “Some people want to see the house, can you guys be out of there in like 15 minutes?”

With pit-crew efficiency, my wife and I would scoop up our one-year-old daughter and two-year-old Boston Terrier to wait it out at the Panera down the street.

While I chased my drunk-walking toddler around the eatery, my wife spied on the potential buyers from the Nanny-cam app she had on her phone. One time she even chastised a couple over remarks they made about our out-of-date bathroom.

Ultimately everything fell into place at just the right time, and my wife and I only carried those two mortgages long enough for my beard to earn a few new white hairs.

I’m hoping Dr. Dovec has the same kind of luck with her surgery center venture. She’s a fiercely passionate surgeon with a steadfast belief that it’s no longer a matter of if bariatric cases will migrate to a surgery center setting, it’s only a matter of when.

No doubt, history favors that assessment. In the past, how often did we hear this surgery or that procedure couldn’t be performed in a surgery center only to discover that not only could these procedures be done safely and efficiently at an ASC, but also that patients often did better when they were?

That’s what is so rewarding about working in this ever-changing industry. Whether it’s procedures like bariatrics (or urology or complex spine) moving to ASCs, technologies redefining what we thought was possible or the shifting ownership structures of the very facilities that provide outpatient care, there is always something interesting to cover. (You can’t say the same for, say, the accounts payable industry. Trust me, I have some colleagues mired in the purgatory of A/P coverage.)

As long as this editorial team is in place, you can count on us to provide the same level of dedication to our coverage as you provide to your patients. OSM