Frank Shen, MD, chief of the division of orthopedic surgery at Charlottesville-based University of Virginia Health System, shares his insight on spine surgeon leadership, challenges ahead and the best opportunities for growth.
Question: How has your role as a spine department leader evolved over the past two to three years? How have your responsibilities changed?
Dr. Frank Shen: As a leader, it is important to not only identify short-term goals, but perhaps more important is to establish and maintain a long-term vision. However, as the landscape of spine care continues to rapidly change and evolve, developing a singular, focused vision can be difficult. I think we are now seeing a patient population that is getting older with more complex medical problems. It's interesting because at the same time this same group of patients are expecting to be more active and wanting to live fuller lives as they get older. They expect that newer, and frequently more expensive, technologies should deliver improved outcomes.
However, as providers we have to try to meet these goals, while working with the challenges of diminishing resources. As a result, in my experience, the ability for a single individual to define the direction of the division is gone. In order to meet these rapidly changing goals it has become increasingly more important to expand relationships and work more broadly with other leaders within the institution to help address these goals.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you are facing as head of the department?
FS: It's interesting, but I think that one of the biggest challenges that we are facing is developing and maintaining the patient-physician relationship. It's subtle, but the very things that we strive to achieve for our patients — such as improved patient access, shorter hospital stays and the application of newer technologies — combined with metrics that we strive to meet for our hospital, such as increased clinic volumes, reduced medical costs and implementation of electronic medical records, can all serve to slowly erode the patient-physician relationship.
If we're not careful, we can easily find ourselves spending less and less time with our patients, and interfacing more and more with our computers. We may also find that the time that we do spend with our patients may be focused more on talking about the newest available procedures and technologies, and less on what it is that our patients really want or what they need.
Q: What do you consider your No. 1 priority to ensure departmental success?
FS: I think the No. 1 priority for continued departmental success is maintaining a patient-centric focus. This may sound simple, but in actuality it really is much more difficult than we think. This means that as you work across specialties to develop new clinical programs, implement new technologies or consider new clinical research trials, we always go back to the question of whether or not this will ultimately be better for our patients. If we do this, I think we will always find that individually, as a division and as an institution, we will always continue to grow, improve and succeed.
Q: What are the department's goals for 2019 and what is your vision moving forward?
FS: The goal of the spine division is really about trying to develop integrated services and the idea that we can provide a patient-centric experience across multiple specialties and locations. I think it means working with leaders from different specialties, as well as our hospital administration and industry, to focus on achieving the needs of the patient. It means improving patient care, expanding clinical and basic science research, improving orthopedic residency education and improving spine fellowship training. Is it something that we can fully realize by 2019, or by 2020? Probably not, but it is something that we need to continually focus on and strive for.
To learn more about key trends in the spine field today, register for the Becker's 17th Annual Future of Spine + The Spine, Orthopedic and Pain management-Driven ASC Conference, June 13-15, 2019 in Chicago.