Why Some ASCs ‘Are Going to Be Left Out’ of Healthcare’s Next Era
July 16, 2026 | By: Francesca Mathewes | Article produced and published by Becker's Healthcare
ASCs that wait on downside risk aren’t just falling behind, according to Dan Tasset — they’re pricing themselves out of the healthcare delivery system entirely.
Mr. Tasset returned this month as CEO of Leawood, Kan.-based NueHealth, the ASC company he founded in 1997, after five years spent studying where healthcare was headed. What he found reshaped his sense of urgency around one shift in particular: provider accountability.
“The best way to define accountability is that you have to stand behind your product and service,” Mr. Tasset said. “In other words, you’ll have to guarantee what you’re doing. You have to guarantee the results. You have to guarantee not only the clinical results, but you’ll have to guarantee the patient satisfaction, patient experience and you’ll have to guarantee the cost.”
Guaranteeing outcomes at that level requires data most ASCs aren’t yet built to collect. According to a July 2025 survey published by the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, 76% of ASCs now use an EHR, up from 55% in 2021. Yet nearly 1 in 4 ASCs still rely on paper, and two-thirds of those plan to remain paper-based until regulations force a change. For the first time since 2021, ASCA’s survey ranked data collection as the most valuable EHR benefit, cited by 87% of users.
“If they don’t have even an EHR inside and they’re still using paper medical records, I’m just a real believer that [that] ASC is going to be in real trouble,” he said,
Mr. Tasset drew a parallel to the ASC industry’s earliest days, when the site of care itself had to be defended.
“When we first started three decades ago, we were having to defend that you could safely do any surgery in a surgery center,” he said. “We had to defend it to the insurance companies. We had to defend it among the health system community. Today it’s common practice.”
He sees the same dynamic repeating now, with downside risk in place of site-of-care legitimacy as the thing ASCs will have to prove they can handle. And this time, in his view, the industry doesn’t have three decades to get there.
“If a surgery center is not moving seriously in this direction right now, they are going to be left out,” he said. “I’m not talking about being at risk. They’re just going to be left out of the delivery system. So they’re going to have to get on board with this. There is no doubt in my mind.”
Mr. Tasset pointed to CMS’ Ambulatory Specialty Model as an early version of the grading system he expects to become standard. The program is already ranking roughly 8,600 physicians on outcomes for lower back pain or heart conditions, he said, and he expects CMS to extend the approach to other medical conditions over time — with commercial payers following its lead.
“Can you imagine being an ASC and not having the data to be able to prove what you’re doing in terms of clinical quality and cost?” he said.
