A consolidation partnership has been a consideration for Geneva, Ill.-based Fox Valley Orthopedics, but President and Managing Partner Vishal Mehta, MD, wanted to be deliberate about who to work with.
“We’ve been in the community for a long time, and we have to make a decision about what we want to be and who we want to be, and we decided that we want to continue to grow,” Dr. Mehta told Becker’s. “We really enjoy taking care of our patients and our communities. There’s a lot of need out there for patients who still need orthopedic care that can’t get it. We’d like to help those people, and we truly enjoy coming to work and doing our job. We made this decision to continue down this path toward growth, and then the question becomes, how to do that.”
Dr. Mehta found that in Sequel Ortho, a management services organization Fox Valley Orthopedics joined in November. Sequel Ortho has a footprint in the Midwest and West with additional partnerships in Nebraska and Iowa.
Dr. Mehta pointed to some aspects of private practice where he hopes to see growth now that Fox Valley Orthopedics is with Sequel Ortho.
“For example, we do a reasonable job with data analytics, but we just don’t have the resources that larger companies have to have a complete data analytics department,” Dr. Mehta said. “We want to expand and open new clinics and new physical therapy locations and expand our operating rooms, and all that takes resources, not only in terms of planning, but also in terms of capital. We want to grow, but we’re probably not doing ourselves a favor by growing within the constraints that we have, and we could probably benefit from a strategic partner of some sort.”
Consolidation has been common in orthopedics, but Dr. Mehta said it was important to work with a group that shared the practice’s values.
“We have three principal tenets that are important to us, and one is maintaining our culture,” he said. “It’s not just how we behave, but how we take excellent care of our patients, and that we’re part of our communities, and that’s very important to us. The other part of it is taking care of our employees. Our employees are the most important thing to us, and that’s where a lot of systems fail when they mistreat their employees. It shows in the patient care. People aren’t happy coming to work and they don’t want to go that extra mile, and we want employees that are happy and love taking care of patients. For our last pillar, we think it’s critically important that the physicians are in charge and calling the shots.”
Fox Valley Orthopedics was approached by different partners including private equity firms and hospital systems, but Dr. Mehta said it wasn’t until Sequel that he found a group that also shared his values.
His search took him all the way to Omaha, Neb., where Sequel Ortho is based, to see how the MSO operated. Dr. Mehta said he was impressed with its culture.
“The culture and the commitment to their patients and the commitment to their staff was very similar to ours,” he said. “It’s not always that way. I used to go to a lot of medical practices where everybody from the front desk to the person rooming to the person answering the phone is just cranky, and it doesn’t have to be that way. They’re very invested in their community, like doing outreach. It’s also very much focused on being organized and analytical about patient care.”
With the partnership, Dr. Mehta said he’s especially excited for opportunities to expand on patient outcomes analysis and finding new solutions in the year ahead.
“Looking at patient satisfaction is one part of those outcomes, but there’s also the hard numbers behind it such as infection and complication rates,” he said. “We’ve done that at Fox Valley Orthopedics for a while, and we know that, for example, our infection rates are lower if you have a joint replacement in our surgery center than they are at a hospital. We’ve been able to monitor that, but now we can actually do it, not only with more data and a broader platform, but some of this stuff just costs a lot of money. We’ll be able to put AI on top of data analytics to bring out some trends and open our eyes to things that you would not have discovered on our own. This scale gives us the ability to have a data analytics department to monitor that data, not only look at the things that we know are important, but potentially bring to light things that we didn’t realize we could address.”
