Dr. Donnally of Texas Spine Consultants in Dallas has also built a following on social media platforms including YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. His videos focus on education on a variety of spine surgeries and healthcare topics.
He joined the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedics Podcast” to discuss the benefits of his social media engagement and the trends he’s following in healthcare.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: How are you seeing your social media presence translate into your day-to-day work? Do you see patients coming in feeling more empowered and knowledgeable than a decade ago?
Dr. Chester Donnally: Fortunately, I’m at a point in my practice where I’m happy to share the love. I have a group of about 15 spine surgeon friends, and I might get a text from one of them every couple days either thanking me or cursing me for sending them a patient in their hometown. I have these patients from California, New York, South Florida, Philadelphia, and they ask me in the comments, “Hey who’s a good spine surgeon you would trust in my area?”, and I have all these resources to give them. So I’m able to kind of share the love, and for better or worse, different spine patients go to my friends or colleagues or people that I just think are really trustworthy.
Sometimes those patients instead want to fly down here to Dallas to be seen by me, which I always do appreciate. But it’s definitely helped with organic recruitment. Something else that’s pretty interesting is that some of the patients I see have no idea that I have social media. But maybe when they go home and research their condition, my YouTube video pops up about spondylolisthesis. So it’s been helpful for an organic patient recruitment and to reinforce some of the concepts that I can fortunately share with some of my local community.
Q: What are the three healthcare trends that you’re following this year?
CD: In training we didn’t use much navigation for placing pedicle screws and cages, and I felt very comfortable not using navigation. Then I just woke up one day and decided I didn’t like the extra radiation risk coming to myself and my team from not using navigation. Now I navigate about 90% of the pedicle screws I place. That’s all great, but there’s so much infrastructure needed for navigation these days. There’s so much cost. Most of these hospitals that have it already purchased it well before I came along. Even the intraoperative C-arm that makes the 3D navigation possible takes up a lot of space.
If there’s a way we continue to make the navigation technology smaller and cheaper, just like our cell phones or TVs, I think it’d be great to see. Some of our navigation technology and the augmented reality technology is a little bulky and a little cumbersome now, but if that can be something that’s even smaller, or can be placed onto the glasses you’re wearing. There’s just so many avenues from that standpoint. So navigation is one way.
My No. 2 point is just for fusions. It would be great if we can use navigation to help us with decompressions. We talk about robotic technology all the time, and right now for the most part, robots only help with fusion. It’d be great if robot navigation could help us with decompression, and there’s some out there that are being tested and being used to see how we know when we’ve decompressed enough of the spine or if there is a certain probe we can put on the nerve. From a navigation technology standpoint and from a nonfusion standpoint, I think that’s a great role.
Then No. 3 trend is looking at physician health. Are there certain things in terms of our structures, the loops we wear, the microscopes we use, that help put less strain on our neck or on our back? It goes back to my first thing with navigation. The reason I switched to navigation was for less radiation, so hopefully better health benefits for me long term. Are there other things as a surgeon I could do in the office that helped my longevity?
