Surgical Solutions Reformulating Health Care

Surgical Solutions Reformulating HealthThroughout her career, Alyssa Rapp has not been afraid to ask, “Now what?” From training as a competitive gymnast to running companies, Alyssa has always been used to working hard and looking ahead. Alyssa fell in love with her first entrepreneurial idea while studying at Stanford Business School, and, for the better part of the next decade, ran Bottlenotes.com, first an e-commerce business that pivoted into a leading digital media company in the US wine industry.

From 2015-2017, Alyssa advised start-ups and private equity-backed companies alike through AJR Ventures. In 2017, Alyssa and

her family decided to move to Chicago where, as of January 2018, Alyssa was named the CEO of Surgical Solutions by private equity firm Sterling Partners. Within six months, she was named one of Crain’s Chicago’s “Notable Women in Health Care” and made the list for a second year in a row in 2019. Within the same year the company made the 2019 Top 50 Healthcare Companies and Top 100 Leaders in Healthcare.

Surgical Solutions helps hospitals drive throughput and efficiency in their operating rooms by providing expert, trained technicians for pre-operative, intra-operative, post-operative, and decontamination services to support their surgeons and nurses. More, Surgical Solutions also provides hospitals with a bundled service offering of labor, capital equipment and repairs management that helps hospitals convert large fixed costs into variable costs since these hospitals pay a fixed fee per procedure for the entire bundle. In sum, the company provides end-to-end solutions to hospital customers including human capital (CRCST trained technicians), capital equipment, equipment repairs management, and disposable instrumentation for minimally invasive surgeries.

Surgical Solutions mission is two-fold, firstly to provide the support services to the physicians, surgeons, and nurses that allows them to perform at the top of their licenses when delivering patient care, and secondly to provide cost-savings, efficiency and throughput gains at medical institution that are crucial in their current healthcare environment of “do more with less” and “value-based care.” A partnership with Surgical Solutions enables hospitals to operate as economically, efficiently and profitably as possible, while supporting the highest possible job satisfaction for clinicians.

The company has been assisting in the present COVID-19 pandemic by releasing whitepapers that highlight study insights from customers like Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport and its partnership with Surgical Solutions. The OLSU study focuses on the fact that, in the post – COVID-19 era, there will be increased pressure on hospitals—and in GI/endoscopy suites, specifically—to reschedule all of the cases that were cancelled during the Global Pandemic of 2020. Partnerships with contracted vendors like Surgical Solutions demonstrate that a scalable model for hospital leaders can be put in place, ensuring consistency and expertise in endoscope reprocessing in the face of the maximum productivity anticipated of clinicians in the post-COVID-19 environment. Another paper discusses the pressing need for health systems and ASCs to re-evaluate operations and develop new short- and long-term strategies to ensure economic sustainability in the midst of the volatility created by COVID-19. It illustrates that a fixed fee per procedure arrangement, provided by vendors like Surgical Solutions, results in tremendous savings when case volumes decline as they have during the 2020 pandemic. This also allows health systems to reduce capital expenditures and to better match supply and demand of equipment and technician support. Furthermore, this outsourced model allows for less downtime between surgeries and greater OR throughput.

According to Alyssa, “there is no question that there will be great winners and great losers in businesses as a result of COVID-19. It is also no secret that entrepreneurs are capable of adapting with lightning speed and doing whatever it takes to survive. With this unanticipated global economic reset, the fastest, speediest, and hungriest to win will have the fastest starts out of the starting blocks. So, if you are an established organization, it’s time to think entrepreneurially in order to stay afloat and thrive during and post COVID-19. And if you are an entrepreneur: lace up, prepare, and get ready to fly. This could be your time.”