The future of orthopedics is being determined not just in the operating room, but in the C-suite. As outpatient migration, reimbursement pressure, consolidation and shifting patient expectations reshape the specialty, the leaders running the country’s largest orthopedic groups are placing different bets on what comes next.
Here are the predictions of five orthopedic CEOs:
1. Bryan Kelly, MD, MBA. President and CEO, Hospital for Special Surgery (New York City): Dr. Kelly, who leads the top-ranked orthopedic hospital in the country for the 16th consecutive year, told Becker’s that too many systems are chasing the wrong target by racing to add operating rooms and recruit surgeons.
“It’s easy to fall into the idea that orthopedics is just about surgery,” Dr. Kelly said.
The organizations that win the next decade of musculoskeletal care will not be the ones with the most ORs. They will be the ones who treat orthopedics as a lifelong relationship with the patient’s body, running from prevention and performance through rehabilitation, regenerative medicine and surgery when necessary.
“HSS is not just a place you go when you’re injured,” he said.
2. David Jevsevar, MD. CEO, OrthoVirginia (Richmond, Va.): A practicing orthopedic surgeon leading one of the country’s largest independent orthopedic groups, Dr. Jevsevar said the narrative that independence cannot survive value-based care is outdated.
“In independent practice, we’re delivering better outcomes at lower cost because of our model, not in spite of it,” he said. He drew a sharp line between growth for growth’s sake and growth built around the right things.
“For us, we’ve built scale around physicians and our patients,” Dr. Jevsevar said. “We haven’t built around real estate or things that are less important to the care of patients.”
His take: “Scale is a tool. Ownership is our philosophy.”
3. Allison Farmer. CEO, EmergeOrtho (Durham, N.C.): While many CEOs are focused on growth strategy, Ms. Farmer is sounding the alarm on the precarity of the financial foundation underlying the entire specialty. Leading the largest physician-owned orthopedic practice in North Carolina, she sees the reimbursement system itself as the specialty’s biggest threat.
“At a federal and a state level, healthcare reimbursement infrastructure is just so unstable,” Ms. Farmer said. “We’re seeing all the indicators of a real future problem. I’m concerned, from a Medicare standpoint, that Medicare and Medicare Advantage participants are going to see a drastic decline in the doctors that will serve them.”
Ms. Farmer is preparing for scenarios that include Medicaid funding shortfalls, adding cash-pay options and pushing patients to demand more from their insurers.
4. Christopher Meyer, MD. President and CEO, Twin Cities Orthopedics (Bloomington, Minn.): When Dr. Meyer became TCO’s first practicing physician CEO in early 2026, he stepped into a market that no longer behaves like the orthopedics he entered in 2003.
“When I worked with hospital systems on creating order sets or bringing in new medications, it went through multiple committees, and it took months,” Dr. Meyer said. At TCO, “if a new treatment becomes available, a new product becomes available, a new drug becomes available … we can get pricing contracts, the whole thing set up, and get it done within days.”
Dr. Meyer sees patient behavior, not technology or payers, as the strongest force reshaping the specialty. Patients are increasingly shopping for care like they shop for anything else, with their purchasing habits dictated by speed, convenience, price and transparency. The practices that win, in his view, will be those that can move at retail speed without sacrificing clinical depth.
5. Andre Blom. CEO, Illinois Bone & Joint Institute (Des Plaines, Ill.): For Mr. Blom, the future of orthopedics is not about choosing between independence and consolidation. It is about using one to protect the other.
“I think consolidation is inevitable,” he told Becker’s. “But I actually view it as a positive for independent practice.”
After IBJI grew roughly 50% through consolidation in 2020, without aligning with a health system or private equity, Mr. Blom has built a thesis around selective scale, value-based care and digital ownership.
“We learned a decade ago you have to have control over your own digital space,” he said, pointing to IBJI’s in-house patient navigation and risk-stratification tools. “We are and remain optimistic about independence and autonomous practice. We think that running the model we do is important for the community, important for society and important to keep a balance of availability for value.”
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