Few surgeons have had both the battlefield and the operating room shape their philosophy of care quite like Benjamin “Kyle” Potter, MD.
Chair of orthopedic surgery at Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine and a retired U.S. Army colonel, he has spent his career translating lessons from combat trauma into innovations that advance how patients heal. Now, as artificial intelligence moves from research to reality, he sees orthopedics standing at another turning point.
“We’re not too far from a time when AI will permeate, if not all, at least many more aspects of healthcare than it does right now — whether it’s patient intake forms, prescreening or helping to guide medical decision-making,” Dr. Potter said.
Dr. Potter has long combined clinical expertise with data-driven insight. Predictive modeling, he said, already helps surgeons identify which patients face higher risks for complications such as infection or renal failure. But identifying risk is only the beginning.
“Just because we can predict the future doesn’t necessarily mean that we can change it,” he said. “Identifying those patients is at least half the battle. Then we have to understand which risk factors are modifiable and what we can do as a treatment team to improve the odds of a good outcome.”
He believes AI can help bridge that gap by integrating predictive models directly into clinical workflows.
“One of the first things that will happen is greater integration of these tools with the electronic medical record,” he said. “AI can query them automatically, so the provider doesn’t have to know a predictive model exists. If it’s evidence-based and well-proven, the EMR can just tell you that. That would be huge for improving real-time, evidence-based decision-making.”
Dr. Potter said another crucial step will be keeping those models responsive to change.
“If you’ve taken steps to reduce a patient’s risk, you’ve essentially proven the model wrong,” he said. “We need smart tools that adapt as we intervene — models that continuously learn and get better based on real-time updates from patients and providers.”
That belief in progress extends to how he thinks about aging and activity.
“We have to recalibrate what we think normal looks like at a certain age,” he said. “I see 75-year-olds who are 75 going on 55, and patients who are 60 going on 90. Typically, patients want to do the same thing — or more — tomorrow than they did yesterday.”
Only a few decades ago, a knee replacement at 85 might have been viewed as aggressive. Today, that’s no longer unusual.
“When I was in training, if somebody was 85, that was pushing it — a little old for a knee replacement,” Dr. Potter said. “If somebody was 45, that was really young. Now, 85 isn’t remarkably old and 45 isn’t remarkably young.”
While technology continues to advance, administrative barriers still slow down care. Dr. Potter pointed to prior authorization requirements as one of the most frustrating obstacles for both physicians and patients. He added that automation — and eventually AI — could help make the process more efficient.
“If automated systems can handle the straightforward approvals, we can spend more time on the unique cases that truly require diligence,” he said.
Collaboration, Dr. Potter said, has always been one of the most rewarding parts of his career, both in military and academic medicine.
“The best part of my job — both in the military and here at Penn — is working directly with other providers to give the best care possible to patients with difficult problems,” he said. “That kind of teamwork — everyone rallying around a common purpose — is professionally rewarding, intellectually stimulating and gives patients access to care and procedures they couldn’t get anywhere else.”
Dr. Potter noted that increasing financial and administrative pressures are making collaboration more difficult to sustain. With physicians expected to see more patients, perform more procedures and document more in the EMR, he said that time has become one of the most limited resources in medicine.
As he looks toward 2026, Dr. Potter sees site neutrality — equal reimbursement for inpatient and outpatient procedures — as one of the most significant forces shaping the field.
Dr. Potter described the shift toward outpatient care as both significant and necessary. He said procedures that once required extended hospital stays can now be done safely in outpatient settings, allowing patients to recover at home while reducing overall costs.
The challenge, he said, is ensuring payment models don’t penalize hospitals and physicians for doing what’s right.
“When a patient has to stay in the hospital, the health system or provider shouldn’t take the hit because someone was too sick or had too challenging of a social situation to go home,” Dr. Potter said. “Some of these pressures are good because they push us to be more efficient and keep costs down. Others have the potential to create real social, medical or financial problems.”
For Dr. Potter, the future of orthopedics rests on maintaining that balance — between innovation and oversight, efficiency and empathy, technology and the human touch.
“Our patients are pushing us to have better outcomes and to keep them active for longer,” Dr. Potter said. “That’s both a challenge and an opportunity for the profession.”
