Outpatient spine surgery remains an area of growth with the share of spine surgeries in the ASC growing 8% between 2021 and 2024. And for Hardy Sikand, CEO of Indiana Spine Group, some procedures are staples for the practice’s ASC.
Mr. Sikand discussed the top outpatient spine surgery opportunities for the Carmel-based practice at Becker’s 22nd Annual Spine, Orthopedic and Pain Management-Driven ASC + The Future of Spine Conference.
Note: This excerpt was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What specific procedures do you see as the biggest financial growth opportunities in your specific markets over the next three years and why?
Hardy Sikand: Our physicians feel comfortable doing a lot of anterior lumbar interbody fusion procedures in an outpatient setting, along with sacroiliac joint fusions. We also have an inpatient hospital for spine dedicated spine, so a lot of those procedures are done in our inpatient facility.
The bread and butter for our ASCs are single-level and two-level anterior cervical discectomy and fusion and single- and two-level laminectomy. We started doing ACDFs in this center over 25 years ago. Our founding physician wrote some of the early literature about taking them into an outpatient center, so we feel very comfortable there.
On the non-operative side, we are looking at the ReActiv8 procedure. We’ve been doing spinal cord stimulation for many years. We also have the Intercept procedure for pain physicians. We’ve been doing a fair amount of that in our facilities, which we think is an excellent procedure as we start to bring these procedures in-house. The main thing we’re focusing on is appropriate payment from the payers and approved payments. We struggle with that just like everyone else, but we certainly continue to talk to the payers about the value that these procedures bring and then hopefully are able to do them in an economic fashion in our center.
