Ravi Chari, MD, stepped into the role of Orthopaedic Solutions Management’s CEO last year and over the past seven months he’s bolstered its practices’ supply chain, infrastructure and benchmarking.
Dr. Chari spoke with Becker’s about how his time with OSM is going and the strategies that are helping the company thrive.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: How is the Orthopaedic Solutions Management team growing?
Dr. Ravi Chari: We’re really trying to make sure we have all of the core areas to support our practices. We’re adding a lot more capability in terms of core functions of the organization that support the practices. For instance, we have brought on a new supply chain officer, Ken Gillette, and he will create a more seamless way to bring on the best products in the most cost-efficient way for our practices. We’ve added a new chief customer officer (CCO), Abby Sorice, to help expand how we think about our digital presence and patient experience. We want to meet patients on their terms and be that provider of choice in their mind all the way from awareness through the appointment and ultimately be a group they would highly recommend.
Q: Can you dive in a bit more on your supply chain strategy?
RC: We’ve partnered with one of the largest group-purchasing organizations and this helps us access and leverage best pricing when it comes to products. It’s not uncommon in a large practice like ours that there’s a lot of like-type products being purchased recurrently by multiple practices. Consolidating that under one framework allows us to leverage our size and our scale and partner with a group purchasing organization to help manage cost and sourcing.
Q: When we spoke for the first time, you were stepping into this CEO role and had a goal to optimize integration and enhance infrastructure. How have those goals come along?
RC: When I think of the things that we have done to optimize, organize and support the practices, these are a few highlights of what we have focused on: supply chain, optimizing financial accounting, planning and analytics, improving our overall HR functions and bringing some consistency across the portfolio with respect to operational performance. We started to provide assessment tools for the practices to measure their operations and labor performance against benchmarking.
We’re going to continue that in the back half of the year, adding more depth to the supply chain and solidifying our HR support functions for our practices, especially in recruiting. Additionally, we are focusing on our IT operations, specifically on service, cybersecurity and app integration. On the practice operations side we’re going to work closely with our clinics to optimize staffing productivity and spend. Also, with the addition of a CCO, we want to build on connecting our practices with our communities with an overall marketing and branding plan.
Q: Have there been any interesting insights that have come from these assessment tools?
RC: One of the luxuries we have when we’re as large as we are is that we’re able to look and see what “good” looks like. When one of the practices does something at a very high level, we study this, standardize it and bring that forward [to the other groups] to show what’s possible, and challenge everyone else to raise the bar to meet that new standard.
Q: What’s the growth plan for this year?
RC: We’ve done a lot of work to really lock down the structure of our operating model and start putting metrics around performance expectations for those shared services. We feel really bullish about this unique capability when we talk to practices and help them see that partnering with us will allow them to improve their overall ability to deliver care in a pretty significant way.
Our focus is to continue to engage with practices and help them see that with OSM’s core goal of helping physicians stay in independent private practice and how we organize around helping them support their patient flow, their operational cost and cost management, we provide a real avenue for them to remain independent and prosperous. We know that all independent physician practices are experiencing a lot of cost pressure and margin compression right now. We fundamentally believe that physicians remaining in private practice is the best way to deliver care for all Americans, and we want to be that solution that reimagines private practice, empowers excellence and enables orthopedic surgeons to remain independent.
