In recent months, Indianapolis-based OrthoIndy has made significant advances in the orthopedic landscape.
In December the practice became the first in the state to use Johnson & Johnson MedTech’s Velys robot for partial knee replacement. Philip Huang, DO, performed the debut case.
“The technology allows for greater precision and accuracy during the procedure, which is a critical aspect for partial knee replacements specifically,” Dr. Huang said in a news release. “As a result, patients undergoing partial knee replacements with the Velys Robotic-Assisted Solution often experience a faster recovery while also hopefully improving long term outcomes and survivorship.”
Then in January, OrthoIndy became part of an upcoming merger alongside Evansville-based Tri-State Orthopaedics and Fort Wayne Orthopedics. The merger, OrthoIndiana, will launch in mid-2025 and focuses on the preservation of independence amid recent growth of private equity-backed management service organizations.
“We’re trying to take care of patients and give them excellent care, and the environment has made that more and more difficult as we’ve evolved through the last few years here,” Jerald Cooper, MD, president of Fort Wayne Orthopedics, said. “I think the timing just relates to that. And as a result, we started looking to see what else we could do. Our physicians looked into [private equity and health system partnerships] and decided that wasn’t the way that we wanted to go because we didn’t feel that that was what was best for our patients or our employees. The idea of an aggregation has been out there, and we actually started looking at some of that prior to being in discussion with our new partners here, and it was just a matter of trying to find the right people to fit up to be able to do that.”
The next month the practice announced the world’s first anterior lumbar interbody fusion with Theradaptive’s OsteoAdapt SP implant. The practice and M. Craig McMains, MD, are part of the Oasis clinical trial evaluating OsteoAdapt SP in transforaminal interbody fusions and ALIF surgeries.
“I think more people, as we get better products, will utilize things like synthetics,” Dr. McMains said. “The innovation is going to come from personalized medicine. You’re going to have personalized biologics. You’re going to have a biologic that knows how to go into your body and stimulate it to lay down bone in the most effective and the most efficient manner possible. As we expand forward, we’re going to get to those solid fusions faster and we’re going to apply that learning of biologics into the implants themselves.”
