Stabilization, unity and staying humble define how John Crockarell, MD, is leading Campbell Clinic in 2026.
Dr. Crockarell was named chief of staff of the Memphis, Tenn.-based practice in January. Although the practice has a prominent place in the region’s orthopedic landscape, Dr. Crockarell said he remains steadfast in keeping up patient quality and physician satisfaction.
He spoke with Becker’s about his strategy and what orthopedic leaders can do to support their practices amid headwinds.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What are your biggest leadership priorities?
Dr. John Crockarell: The number one thing is unity. Like a lot of practices, we’ve had a lot of challenges since COVID-19, and my main goal is to try to stabilize and enhance our culture. I also want to continue to lead our growth as we have affiliated and expanded across the state of Tennessee and into other surrounding states as well.
Q: “Stabilize” is an interesting word. Can you elaborate on that as it relates to practice culture?
JC: We’ve had some attrition in recent years, which is not something that we’ve been used to, and sometimes it’s felt perhaps generational. But my goal is to help unify the group, help establish trust with each other so that we can move forward and provide the best care we can for our patients and do the best we can training residents.
Q: Are there any particular headwinds you’re hearing from physicians or within your own work?
JC: These aren’t unique to us, but it seems as if the amount of work only continues to grow as reimbursement declines. The usual things of administrative work that goes along with practicing as a physician and trying to keep up with those demands, along with mission work is a lot to ask of anybody. So we’re just trying to keep up with all those roles that we all play as a group.
Q: With reimbursement, what’s been your strategy to manage and maybe even get ahead of those types of challenges?
JC: Well, of course we own our two surgery centers, and the ability to move more and more of our practice into the outpatient setting has helped from a reimbursement standpoint. Physician reimbursement is not great, but facility fees have been very helpful. Enhancing our outpatient practice and honestly, right sizing our outpatient practice has been important. Particularly in the last year, we may have had more operating rooms than we needed in 2025, so getting the staffing and scheduling is something that we worked on to make that part of our business more profitable.
Q: What are your plans for Campbell Clinic’s growth?
JC: We’ve added some partners, and we plan to add a few more. I’m a total joint surgeon, and I do hip and knee replacement. As a division, we’ve aged a little bit, and so we’re trying to add more physicians. We’ve hired one total joint doctor, and may hire a second. That will help us to honestly keep up with demand, stay ahead of our local competition, and keep up with all the aspects of total joint care in particular. Whether it’s just doing a lot of primaries or keeping up with the revision burden that only seems to increase as the need for primary, total, joint replacement goes up, it has kept pace at least as well seemingly. We’re a tertiary referral center, so we view that as part of our mission — taking care of patients that come into our doors for primary work as well as revision work.
Q: When it comes to orthopedic competition, how will you differentiate Campbell Clinic in the landscape?
JC: We’re the biggest player in town, but we do have good competition, and that makes us a better organization. It helps us keep our game up, so to speak. The way we feel like we differentiate ourselves is we care for patients across the spectrum of orthopedic needs, and we do things that that aren’t necessarily maybe wise choices from a profit and loss standpoint, but we feel like if we take care of patients regardless of the complexity of their problems, that will help us to remain dominant in our market.
Q: What is your staff and physician recruitment and retention strategy? Is there anything that works for you that other leaders can learn from?
JC: What works the best for us is we train a lot of residents, and historically we have utilized that talent pool. We also have fellowship-trained orthopedic surgeons across all the sub-specialties, and that leads to relationships across the country. In the recent past, we’ve still hired residents that we train, but we’ve leveraged relationships that we have with department chairs and fellowship directors across the country to find folks who are interested in the geography and the private practice model.
Q: What’s one thing that all physician leaders such as yourself do this year to thrive?
JC: Stay humble and stay true to the doctor-patient relationship. At the end of the day, what we do is very individual and very personal, and we can’t lose sight of that for all of the other challenges that we face and all the other roles that we have to play. What matters the most, I think, for physician leaders is to keep their eyes on the prize of valuing every patient individually and taking good care of them.
