Dr. Meneghini, founder and CEO of Indiana Orthopedic Institute, joined the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast” to discuss his outlook on managing an orthopedic practice.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: What excites you about overseeing an orthopedic group, and what makes you nervous?
Dr. Michael Meneghini: What excites us is that we’re being innovative in how we deliver healthcare. I think we’re going to start seeing, finally, a shift towards value-based care instead of just a fee-for-service model. We’re going to start being compensated and even rewarded, for taking risks and delivering high quality care at a lower cost and a lower site of service. That’s what excites us about the model that we’ve built, and now two and a half years into it, being able to open up a facility that can accomplish and be very successful in value-based care.
What makes me nervous is probably what makes everybody nervous, which is being an independent orthopedic group, in an era of high labor cost and high inflation and decreasing overall reimbursement. So we have to run a practice and business and orthopedic group, very lean and very efficient. And I think the advantage we have and why we’re excited is we just started this two and a half years ago. And so we started it in the era of high cost of labor and high inflation. So we’ve built our practice lean, and I think that’s helpful in the modern era.
Q: Can you dive into some more strategies on supporting margins, you know, amid all these rising costs in healthcare delivery?
MM: It’s a challenge. And I think the way we go about it is in multiple ways. For us to keep our margins reasonable, we have to be really judicious about what we do in this facility, in our other facilities, and in our programs. So take something really expensive like a robot. Certainly the industry is trying to bring the cost of robots down, but we may not be able to do that immediately, because it’s a really high cost. The other thing is getting enough scale to offer and cover enough patient lives where the payers will give us rewards for the quality that we perform on our patients. We have nine hip and knee replacement surgeons, and when you have nine hip and knee surgeons, you have enough scale where you can at least come to the payers and say, don’t crush us financially. We’re trying to do a great job, taking care of your patient lives and your insured lives, and delivering high high quality care at a low cost. Now that’s not a guarantee, but I think so far we’ve been reasonably successful doing that.
