Spine surgeon Isador Lieberman, MD, said he’s wary of two trends making headways in the industry.
Dr. Lieberman, of Plano-based Texas Back Institute, shared his experiences on the Becker’s Spine and Orthopedics Podcast.
Question: What are you seeing right now in the industry that you think is most important for leaders to pay attention to?
Dr. Isador Lieberman: There’s two big trends that I’m seeing right now, both of which are a little concerning to me.
The first trend is the use of social media in spine surgery. It’s permeated in everything in society today, and there are benefits to it, but it can be problematic. As spine surgeons, we want to make sure that we’re competitive. We stay in the practice, we can attract the right patients to us, and the use of social media for that is exceptionally important. But I do see a trend where social media is embellishing what’s going on out there in spine surgery, where individuals are promoting themselves inappropriately. To a certain extent, I do a lot of revision surgery and unfortunately, I see the guys on social media, and then I see their patients coming to me. They’re on social media saying, “I did this operation in under 45 minutes, minimally invasive,” but then the patient is back with me six months later because the surgery was not done appropriately. The use of social media has to somehow be regulated and monitored. Likewise, the ability for ratings online has become problematic. There’s a lot of fake ratings out there, and there’s a lot of legitimate ratings out there. But when there is a negative, unwarranted rating on somebody that becomes very difficult to correct, so we need to figure all of that out.
The second issue that I see in spine surgery is the amalgamation of groups and essentially a lot of physicians moving toward an employee model or private equity firms that are coming up and are starting to gobble up spine practices. At the Texas Back Institute we’re a big group, and we were looking at ways to maintain our relevance and sustainability. We met with a number of the private equity groups, and it dawned on me that if these guys think they can make money off of myself and my partners, we have to figure out how to make money off ourselves. Why are we giving it away to them? Until the private equity group can actually bring a benefit to the table, to the surgeons such as some form of contracting, I really don’t see any role. This pendulum is swinging toward private equity and the roll up of the groups, but it’s self limited and that pendulum is going to swing right back and knock people over.
