Bloomington, Minn.-based Twin Cities Orthopedics has named Christopher Meyer, MD, as CEO, making him the first practicing physician to lead the organization.
Dr. Meyer joined TCO in 2003 and has held leadership roles for nearly two decades, including on the board of directors and executive committee. He has served as president since 2023 and will now serve concurrently as president and CEO while continuing to practice as an orthopedic surgeon.
His appointment comes as orthopedic groups face a patient market that looks less like the scheduled medicine of the early 2000s and more like on-demand retail, where speed, convenience and transparency increasingly determine where patients choose to go.
A CEO role that started as a placeholder
Dr. Meyer stepped into the interim CEO position after the organization’s previous CEO resigned. He said the job was initially less about ambition than stewardship, keeping the practice steady while the organization searched for a long-term leader.
“It wasn’t a role that I knew that I wanted,” Dr. Meyer said.
As the search unfolded, he worked with an executive coach and began learning the mechanics of a role he described as fundamentally different from physician leadership, not just in title, but in how decisions are made and how accountability works.
“Leadership for a CEO is very different from leadership as a physician,” he said.
The transition, he said, was not seamless. Instead, it required a willingness to be coached in areas where high-performing clinicians are rarely asked to start from scratch.
“The coach would have told you in my first few weeks of coaching me that I was terrible for the job,” Dr. Meyer said.
Over time, he said the conversation inside the organization changed. Rather than asking what external executive might lead the next chapter, TCO began asking whether the leadership it needed was already inside the practice, especially as the organization’s operational complexity grew and the distance between clinical reality and executive strategy started to matter more.
“We started down the search for a new CEO,” Dr. Meyer said. “And as we evolved and started looking at options, I started talking to the team and the consultant about whether or not it made sense for me to stay.”
He ultimately approached the board with a narrower goal: stability.
“I decided that I would ask the board if I could stay on and see if I could create the stability for the leadership role for the next couple of years,” he said.
Real-time physician leadership, not monthly physician feedback
While many practices rely on physician governance through board oversight or periodic advisory input, Dr. Meyer said what changed during the interim period was the tempo of physician involvement. In weekly leadership meetings, decisions could be shaped in the moment, rather than filtered through layers of interpretation.
“It’s created kind of real-time input from a physician standpoint into leadership decisions,” he said.
That rhythm, he said, also changed his physical presence inside the organization. He remains a practicing orthopedic surgeon, but his workweek now shifts between clinical time and executive time, often outside normal office hours.
“I’m doing a couple half days a week here, and then 6 a.m. meetings and 6 p.m. meetings,” Dr. Meyer said.
For TCO, the model is designed to make the clinical perspective constant rather than occasional, not a physician voice arriving after decisions are drafted, but a physician lens embedded in the process itself.
Access as the new competitive edge
Dr. Meyer described patient behavior as one of the strongest forces reshaping orthopedic practices. When he began practicing in 2003, the pace of care was slower and more sequential: appointments were scheduled days out, results were reviewed later and medical records were a request that moved through a department.
“You made an appointment. You probably get seen in a week,” he said. “If you want your medical records, you send a note to the medical record department. They print it, send it to you.”
Now, he said, access has become a retention strategy. TCO has built infrastructure around the idea that if patients cannot be reached quickly, they won’t wait.
“What we found out, if we can’t get to them within 12 to 24 hours, our chances of retaining them start dropping,” Dr. Meyer said.
TCO’s access footprint includes urgent care sites, internal imaging and around-the-clock scheduling designed to keep the first touchpoint from turning into the last.
“We have 12 urgent cares with walk-in access from eight [a.m.] to eight [p.m.], seven days a week,” he said.
One of the most visible changes, he said, is the ability to schedule orthopedic care at the same hours people schedule everything else, including when they are sitting in an emergency department.
“We have a 24-hour AI phone system now,” Dr. Meyer said. “So you can call if you’re in the ER, and you have to make a follow-up for a wrist fracture, you can do it at midnight.”
Physical therapy has also become a front door, not just a downstream service. Patients can begin care without waiting for a physician visit, a move designed to meet demand faster and preserve specialist bandwidth for higher-acuity cases.
“You don’t need to see a physician to go see a therapist,” Dr. Meyer said. “You can go and see your therapist immediately.”
Independence as an operating advantage
Dr. Meyer framed TCO’s independence as less of a philosophical stance and more of an operational tool, one that affects how quickly the organization can adapt, implement and compete.
In systems, he said, even straightforward clinical or operational changes can slow down under the weight of committee structure and formal approvals.
“When I worked with hospital systems on creating order sets or bringing in new medications, it went through multiple committees, and it took months,” he said.
TCO’s model, he said, allows the organization to move faster, whether by adopting new products, changing workflows or bringing in treatment advancements, and to do so on a timeline that matches what patients now expect.
“If a new treatment becomes available, a new product becomes available, a new drug becomes available … we can get pricing contracts, the whole thing set up, and get it done within days,” Dr. Meyer said.
That nimbleness also shapes how the practice approaches transparency for patients who are increasingly shopping for care, including those traveling for treatment and paying out of pocket.
“We can tell them before they even get here what it’s going to cost,” he said.
A shift driven by patient choice
While Dr. Meyer’s appointment is a first for TCO, he described physician-led leadership as a return to an older healthcare structure, now being brought back into relevance by consumer-style patient choice and growing competition.
“In the old healthcare systems, the head of the hospital was always a physician,” he said.
The difference, he argued, is the stakes of choice: patients move quickly and practices have less margin for inconvenience.
“Patients have a lot of choice today,” Dr. Meyer said.
For independent groups like TCO, he said, leadership decisions are inseparable from volume and sustainability.
“We need to get feet through the door in our sites,” he said. “That’s how everything works for our survival.”
Transparency as culture, not messaging
Dr. Meyer also described physician leadership as an internal culture lever, not just a governance shift, but a way to reduce the distance between decisions and the clinicians affected by them.
“Being in the clinics myself and able to communicate with the other physicians about what leadership is doing creates transparency for the organization,” he said.
He described a version of leadership visibility that happens informally, built through day-to-day proximity rather than scheduled meetings.
“I’m in the clinic, and Dr. Kelly walks over to talk,” he said. “I’m in the surgery center. I see the physical therapists when I walk through the clinics.”
A stronger year after a difficult one
Dr. Meyer said the organization’s leadership transition follows a challenging stretch shaped by inflation and reimbursement pressure.
“It was a fairly trying time when our inflation kind of hit us hard,” he said, citing “some payment issues related to insurance that were concerning.”
But he said the past year has felt steadier, with an emphasis on culture and alignment, changes he believes are inseparable from the patient experience.
“We’ve had a lot of fun here this last year, just improving the culture of the organization,” Dr. Meyer said. “Which improves our employee experience and it improves the patient experience.”
He also characterized the group’s recent performance as a marked improvement from the year prior.
“2024 was our hard year,” he said. “’25 was a great, great year.”
With Dr. Meyer now formally in the CEO seat, Twin Cities Orthopedics is signaling that the next phase of its strategy will be shaped by a leader who is still living the patient experience daily, not as a concept, but as a schedule.
