Matthew Lavery, MD, just began his role as OrthoIndy’s new CEO, but he has years of leadership experience behind him.
At the helm of the Indianapolis-based practice, Dr. Lavery has clear sights on how he wants to shape and grow the practice in 2026.
He spoke with Becker’s about his plans to elevate OrthoIndy’s place in the healthcare landscape from external partnerships and internal culture alignment.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are your biggest goals as CEO?
Dr. Matthew Lavery: It’s a big transition personally from being a full-time practicing physician. I’ve been our board president for a little while now, and I’ve been on the board for more than a decade. For a long time I’ve had some administrative responsibilities, but being CEO is a big personal shift in that regard. I’m going to be spending more time doing the administrative tasks and a little less time on the clinical side, which is going to require a little bit of an adjustment.
But I’m really excited. I think in organizations like ours, where we are physician-owned and physician-run, having a CEO who’s also a physician is a really positive thing.
One goal is reiterating and reinforcing our strong culture that we’ve had here for a long time. Another is focusing on operational improvements and expense reductions. I think those are things that everybody thinks about, specifically with culture.
I think one of the things that happened related a little bit to COVID-19 and over the last five years is that most healthcare institutions have seen a lot of turnover in their employee populations. I don’t think it’s unique to OrthoIndy. We’ve certainly experienced it like a lot of other health systems here in the state, and you get a lot of new faces in your organization. It’s an opportunity to reinforce the unique aspects of your culture with those new people. So that’s one of the things I’m going to focus on. For any institution to thrive and to stay true to its mission, those unique aspects of your culture really have to be taught to those new employees and reinforced with them.
I also want to refocus our efforts on that mindset of continuous process improvement. It’s vital for any organization. One example would be our recent introduction of an AI-based scheduling system. We had it up and running for several months now, and it’s certainly time for us to revisit some of the algorithms that drive that system. It’s time to make that better. It’s one thing to introduce it, but you can’t just introduce it and ignore it. You have to introduce it and make it better. We’re going to look at things like that here right away as I get going.
Then the expense reduction side is just one of those challenges that I think every healthcare institution faces. The two biggest line items are cost of labor and cost of supplies and implants. Specifically for an institution like us, where we own our hospital, those things are really expensive. A focus there on how to do things efficiently is extremely important, both from a labor standpoint and on the supply side.
Q: What are some operational efficiency targets or goals you’re looking at?
ML: Back to the AI thing, I think most people are excited about the promised benefits of AI-based systems, and I’m convinced it can help drive operational improvements. I see it as a tool and not as a solution in and of itself. AI is really only as powerful as the questions you ask of it, and my goal as CEO is to personally embrace that idea of utilization of AI to drive some efficiencies. But I still think the way you use it the best is if you’re focused on how to make these processes better and more efficient for your patients. If it’s sacrificing the experience that they have, then that efficiency really has no benefit.
Q: What are the biggest opportunities for improving culture and aligning physicians and staff?
ML: One of my goals early on in this role was to spend some time listening to our employees. I think you drive culture. It can’t be mandated from the top down, and there has to be some feedback that comes from your frontline folks. One of the things I did early on as practice president was send surveys to everybody in the organization — approximately 1,300 employees. I read through all of them, and I got close to 600 responses when I sent this.
And a lot of it was really geared toward some simple things like asking what things we’re doing well and where we need to improve. Part of what I did then was synthesize those answers, and, as practice president, I’ve been trying to institute the top two or three things there. Some of this then is going back and communicating those things with our frontline folks through town hall meetings and email communications. But I’m trying to really focus some of my time here, especially in the first half of the year, on getting out and physically being present in some of the remote offices that I just haven’t spent a lot of time in before because of practice demands.
Q: OrthoIndy is working with Pelto and is also aligned with Indianapolis-based Indiana Hand to Shoulder Center. How are you planning to nurture those relationships? Are there any other growth opportunities you’re eyeing?
ML: There are a couple of things related to that. The Indiana Hand to Shoulder partnership is a good example. We joined forces with those physicians back in April, and up until this point in time, we’ve been they’ve been functioning on like a legacy electronic medical record that they had at their practice, and Jan. 2 is the first day that they’re seeing patients in a clinic under the OrthoIndy EMR. No physicians like EMR transitions. That’s painful, but they’ve got the right attitude about it, which is that we all know it will improve some of our back office processes. Having us all on the same documentation system will help with scheduling procedures, in our operating rooms and from a billing standpoint.
Our relationship through Pelto has been a lot of idea sharing and some shared cost savings through some of the back office products that we’ve obtained. The EMR is a good example of leveraging that relationship with other practices. We were able to obtain a little bit better pricing on our EMR versus us going out and purchasing that solution on our own.
As far as statewide expenses we’re fresh on our expansion with our Ortho Indiana project. Tri-State Orthopedics down in Evansville, Ind., came on to the practice platform Jan. 2, so we will start functioning out of a common parent corporation, effectively starting to align and spread our geographic footprint across the state. That’s an exciting development. It’s been in the works for quite a while now, but today’s the day to go live with that first group coming on.
Q: What’s something that all spine and orthopedic practice leaders, whether or not they’re physicians, should do to thrive in 2026?
ML: It’s the three A’s of healthcare: able, available and affable. What that means to thrive in 2026 is, how do you put yourself in the shoes of patients? Ask yourself questions about how they want to access healthcare in 2026 and what defines a good patient experience on the front end. Design your systems and operational efficiencies with that goal in mind of what’s the best experience. These are things like being able to schedule outside of normal business hours like we’re doing with our AI-based scheduling system. I think those are things that you constantly have to be moving in those directions. But the question you should be asking yourself is what’s the experience the patient wants to have? And then ask how do we leverage current technology and current best practices to provide them with that?
