For doctors seeking to build their own office-based surgery center, it is strongly advisable to seek a consultant. Universal Healthcare Consulting’s compliance program has resulted in tremendous cost savings for many clients from the very early planning stages.
Many clients engage us before identifying a suitable location. In these cases, we assist in the space plan design of the facility, which provides huge cost savings to the client. We work with the client in putting together a design that has certain efficiencies that we can suggest having done this for twenty years. We then work with your architect and contractor to help resolve issues that may be uncovered during the actual blueprint design and construction process. We also make suggestions on different types of flooring, power generators, and other items that save the facility owner many thousands of dollars.
Many of the issues arise in the permitting process with local planning and zoning. If you are building a licensed ASC, planning and zoning are aware of the voluminous requirements. The confusion occurs when plans are submitted for an office-based facility. Often, when plans for a doctor’s office-based surgery facility are submitted to planning and zoning, they automatically assume the plans are for an ASC. The building requirements for an ASC far exceed the building requirements for an office-based facility and thus the plans will be denied. This costs the doctor time and money in that they will either have to, needlessly, amend the plans to include a much more expensive buildout that is not required, or they will need to provide explanations as to what they are actually building which is time-consuming and adds more to the cost.
