More than ever, spine surgeons need to master the operational aspects of their work along with the clinical side.
Spine surgeons discussed the essential business skills for physicians to know during a panel at Becker’s 22nd Annual Spine, Orthopedic and Pain Management-Driven ASC + The Future of Spine Conference.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Question: What’s a business skill that every spine surgeon should master?
Dominic Maggio, MD. Legacy Spine & Neurological Specialists (Little Rock, Ark.): I think it’s the importance of having accurate financial information as a business owner and as a spine surgeon. You need to know where all the expenses are, and it’s not so simple, especially when you have a lot of different avenues where you’re dispensing. They need to be identified and quantified and presented to you in a timely manner so that you can really see if there’s any outliers that shouldn’t be there, and you can act on it quickly, because a lot of times if it’s not organized then you start losing revenue and you don’t even know it until it’s too late. We partner with another company who brings really high quality financial information to us and is able to categorize things and bring it to our attention. That’s been a really important thing for me.
Ramis Gheith, MD. DxTx Pain and Spine: This skill is essential to developing a very robust and extraordinarily successful practice, and it is human connection. That’s a business skill that everybody forgets. You really need to spend time to identify who your patient is and show them that you care.
Beyond that, it’s about how you run your practice. Operational efficiency is absolutely crucial. When you get the patient in the door, how do you get that patient through the practice, so that you’re not being wasteful, but resourceful? Those are very, very simple concepts that we leave at the door sometimes and unfortunately, when you work at a hospital system, it becomes extraordinarily common to see waste. But when you’re in an ASC practice or private practice, it becomes extraordinarily obvious that there are ways to improve outcomes, reduce waste and become operationally efficient. Those are crucial aspects.
The third thing is you should expand service lines. We’re all doing spine and pain management care here, but what about the other patients who have knee pain or hip pain? What about those folks? [My practice] added service lines using interventional radiologists. For me, it’s been extraordinarily successful. It’s a great program, and it’s for patients who oftentimes are not great candidates for major surgery.
Hazem Eltahawy, MD. Eltahawy Neurosurgery & Spine Care Center (Farmington Hills, Mich.): The most important skill that a spine surgeon can have is really team building. Having the right team and identifying the people that can work in that team to build an enterprise and build a practice that shares the same vision and compassion for the patient is the most crucial thing.
Daniel Sciubba, MD. Northwell Health (New York City): There’s two different aspects. I think about the North Star of taking care of patients, right?
The skill is a little different, and when I push this in our system, and I think all of us have to work on this: is that you have to be hungry. That is something that probably is self explanatory and a skill that may or may not be as developable. The other skill we heard about is being smart with people, whether you call that emotional intelligence.
But I think the most important thing is humility and flexibility of thought. The most successful people I’ve been a part of in my life are flexible in thought. That means that the person who has the greatest practice for the last 20 years in a certain market, unless they are flexible, that model will soon change and they will be taken over to be competed against. So you have to continue to be flexible.
