Spine

From mounting administrative burdens to fragmented care and volume-driven reimbursement, spine surgeons see mounting pressure on long-standing care models. Eight spine surgeons discussed which parts of spine care may not survive the next decade and what could replace them. Ask…

Spine practices have weathered years of reimbursement pressure by finding somewhere else to make up the difference. They have increased volume, improved efficiency, shifted cases outpatient and added ancillary revenue. But recent Becker’s reporting suggests each of those strategies has…

Independent spine practices are being squeezed from both sides of the balance sheet. Reimbursement is declining while labor, technology and administrative costs rise. At the same time, payers are making payment harder to secure, outpatient migration is making facility ownership…

The U.S. has the most significant structural barriers to endoscopic spine surgery adoption globally, driven by reimbursement, training and institutional challenges, according to a study published July 8 in the International Journal of Spine Surgery.  Researchers surveyed 1,834 spine surgeons.…

Disc replacement, the Total Posterior Spine System (TOPS) and other motion-preserving options have given spine surgeons more ways to treat degenerative disease without fusing a segment. Four surgeons connected with Becker’s to share whether that has changed how they choose…

For patients with disease at multiple spinal levels, surgeons have traditionally faced a binary choice: fuse everything or disc replacement. Ramin Raiszadeh, MD, of San Diego Spine and Brain Institute, said he now routinely does both in the same operation…

Neurology and neuromuscular procedures generated the highest payout multiple of any high-volume specialty in the federal No Surprises Act dispute resolution process during the third and fourth quarters of 2025, according to CMS data.  Here are three things to know:…

James Mooney, MD, spent seven years training in neurosurgery and another year specializing in minimally invasive and complex spine deformity surgery. The most difficult part of the job, he said, is not the operation. It is deciding who should have…

Endoscopic spine surgery is advancing faster than the workforce trained to perform it.  That, Ben Burch, MD, believes, is the field’s real bottleneck. “I don’t think we have a technology problem in spine surgery,” Dr. Burch, an orthopedic spine surgeon…

For decades, spinal fusion was the go-to answer when a worn-out or herniated disc caused chronic neck or back pain. Take the disc out, fuse the adjacent vertebrae, and eliminate motion at that segment for good. But a growing number…