From orthopedic groups launching new service lines to the continued outpatient orthopedic push, here are some of the biggest topics that Becker’s heard in November from leaders in the orthopedic field.
Hayden Baker, MD. Orthopedic Sports Medicine Surgeon at Endeavor Health Orthopaedic & Spine Institute (Skokie, Ill.): Within the next few years, I believe most shoulder replacements will be performed safely and efficiently in the outpatient setting. Improvements in anesthesia, multimodal pain management and minimally invasive surgical techniques have dramatically reduced postoperative discomfort and complication rates. With proper patient selection and coordinated perioperative care, same-day discharge for shoulder arthroplasty will soon become standard.
Allison Farmer. CEO of EmergeOrtho (Durham, N.C.): EmergeOrtho feels very strongly that private equity is not the appropriate ownership structure for our specialty practice. While we are a for-profit business, our day-to-day decisions prioritize patient care as opposed to profits. Our surgeons make decisions based on patient care. We have payment policies that promote patients being able to get the care that they need. We believe our physician leaders and our administration can do just as well as private equity would.
Nicholas Grosso, MD. President of MedVanta and The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics (Bethesda, Md.): VantaStat is the first piece of the puzzle. We then went on and developed several other pieces to create a suite of technologies and programs so that we can go directly to an employer to take over their musculoskeletal care. We have built a very saleable product that is EMR and regionally agnostic, so we can roll this out anywhere across the country with any other orthopedic group that wants to work with us so very easily. We could easily go to some of the orthopedic groups that we know in other regions and say, “We got this contract with this company. They have 1,000 employees in your area. Here’s what you need to do and work with them.” The goal is that it’s not an independent thing and instead part of a much larger platform.
David Kalainov, MD. Medical Director of Orthopedics at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Chicago): Health insurance and all of the requisite performance measures to maximize payments and mitigate penalties have become too complex. The required infrastructure for documentation oversight, data collection and reporting is expensive and one of the drivers of provider/hospital consolidation, which itself increases costs. A lot of money in healthcare is extracted by entities far removed from patient care. One solution that is likely inevitable due to an expanding and relatively unhealthy U.S. population (i.e., unhealthy in comparison to other economically developed nations) could be universal healthcare insurance with unified performance metrics and diligent oversight of fraud and abuse.
Alexander Meininger, MD. Orthopedic Surgeon and Sports Medicine Specialist at Steamboat Orthopaedic and Spine Institute (Steamboat Springs, Colo.): The ASC is the preferred setting for surgeons of multiple specialties. From our position as orthopedic surgeons, it’s great because there are demanding procedures performed in ASCs and they require repeated efforts. It requires proficiency and motivation for our technologists and nurses to get familiar with the techniques. There’s 100 different steps in an ACL reconstruction, and if we have a different technologist every time we arrive, it just can make the surgery less fluid or less streamlined. If we can optimize those and get a team approach, where we have specific people who are dedicated to spine, total joints and sports medicine procedures, then those cases can be more predictable, more efficient and more satisfying.
