Spine

Spine surgery has historically operated under two sets of economics: one determined by the care delivered and another by the building in which it is delivered. For 2026, Medicare’s ASC conversion factor is $56.322, compared with $91.415 for hospital outpatient…

Spine surgery is moving out of the hospital faster than any payment system was built to handle, and the ability to prove outcomes is becoming the price of admission. As of Jan. 1, spinal fusion sits inside a mandatory Medicare…

Peter Derman, MD, did not leave Texas Back Institute because he wanted distance from the institution. He is clear about that. After nearly eight years at the Plano-based spine group, where he served as a partner and executive committee member,…

Every spine surgeon eventually encounters an adverse event that stays with them long after the patient has left the hospital, and the profession is beginning to reckon with the psychological toll those moments take, according to an article written by…

Large language models are drawing rapid interest in spine surgery, but their value currently lies in supporting physicians rather than replacing their judgment, according to an article written by Aimen Khan, Maximillian Lee, Noah Pogonitz, Daniel Park, MD, and Kern…

UChicago Medicine has added four neurosurgeons to expand its clinical and research capabilities. The health system hired Youssef Comair, MD, as section chief of neuro-oncology; Timothy Witham, MD, as section chief of spine surgery; P.B. Raksin, MD, a specialist in…

John Peloza, MD, has been a fellowship-trained spine surgeon for more than 30 years, long enough to have watched the specialty transform since the early 1990s. For most of his career, he has practiced with Midwest Orthopedic Spine Specialists in…

A restrictive referral process can quietly cap a practice’s surgical volume long before administrators notice the pattern in the numbers. That was the case at Austin Regional Clinic, a multispecialty practice serving about 800,000 patients across Austin, Texas, and its…

Osteoporosis and low bone mineral density are among the most consequential and most frequently overlooked risk factors in elective spine surgery, and optimizing bone health before the operating room is increasingly treated as a standard of care rather than an…

The minimal clinically important difference, or MCID, has become a central tool for judging whether spine surgery actually helped a patient. But treating it as a fixed, one-size-fits-all number can create a false sense of precision, according to an article…