Even as new technologies push forward to improve outcomes, staying grounded in the patient experience will be the key differentiator in spine and orthopedic care, two leaders told Becker’s.
Roger Härtl, MD, director of neurosurgery spine at New York City-based Weill Cornell, said spine surgeons can stand out from the rest by homing in on their patient communications.
“What I find most important is really to communicate with patients,” Dr. Härtl said on an upcoming episode of the Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast. “I think at the end of the day, what we provide as a service is to try to help patients get through a very difficult time in their lives, sometimes with neurological deficit, but frequently with pain. There are very few specialties in medicine that really have to deal with the complexity of symptoms that we have to deal with: the psychological impact that that has on patients and their families.”
Those interpersonal skills are just as important as the latest clinical innovations within spine surgery, he said.
“No matter how good the technology is, no matter how much you’re using navigation, robotics, biologics and AI, I think at the end of the day, you have to take the time to communicate with your patients and be available,” Dr. Härtl said. “That’s the biggest challenge. As we become more involved with technology, this personal note and this feeling for your patient and the ability to communicate is only going to become more important. It’s going to help you differentiate yourself, and it helps you avoid conflict with patients if something goes wrong. It’s really an old principle, but it’s just even more important now than it used to be.”
Matthew Lavery, MD, Indianapolis-based OrthoIndy’s new CEO, echoed that emphasis, saying that keeping up with his clinical work is vital to his work as a leader.
Stepping into the CEO role he’s trimming his clinical work to about two-and-a-half days a week, Dr. Lavery told Becker’s. However he wants to keep up with the realities of the physicians he leads.
“As a physician CEO, I think it’s important to continue to see the same challenges that my physician partners see on the front end of things, how we’re delivering care, how patients are accessing them and their challenges with our EMR and our billing systems,” Dr. Lavery said. “If you lose touch with those things, then some of the benefits of being a physician CEO start to disappear.”
Dr. Lavery said that physician leaders bring a unique advantage to the table.
“For most administrative CEOs who fill those roles, unless they’ve been a patient themselves, they just don’t understand the nuances of what it’s like to go through and access the system like that. I think that’s where we have immediate benefit. If your focus is on providing the best patient experience, then patients will naturally flock to your organization. I’ve had that front-line experience with my patients. I get the feedback from when they get a little frustrated with something. For instance, I’ll have people who come see me and say they tried to go to another practice but it would take weeks and you were easier to access. Or they’ll ask to improve areas as well. To me those are all unique things that physicians get all of that front-line feedback. Administrative-only CEOs just never have that experience with patients, and they miss out on some of those really detailed things that we have to sort of take the information and turn it into a better experience.”
