In a noisy healthcare landscape, spine surgeon Erich Anderer, MD, said he’s putting his focus on tech, information access and preventing the need for surgery to begin with.
Dr. Anderer, of NYU Langone Health in New York City, discussed the top spine and healthcare trends he’s following during an upcoming episode of the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast.”
Question: What are the top three trends that you’re following in healthcare today?
Dr. Erich Anderer: Number one is access to information. I think in a lot of ways, it’s had a positive influence on the way I think people experience healthcare. What I mean by that is this democratization of information has been helpful for people to be informed about their conditions. I don’t think it’s ever going to replace going to a doctor, and I think that really the best thing to do when you have questions about your health is to maybe take some of that information that you digest from other sources and [use it to] help formulate questions. You can be that much more informed when you go to your visit and get that much more out of your visit with your physicians. I generally see it as a positive.
As a surgeon it’s hard not to talk about tech, and that’s another thing that I’m super excited about: robotics for spine and AI applications to help us understand who the right patients for surgery are. Or how to predict how patients are going to do afterwards, where to send them to recover, etc. I think it’s really revolutionized the way that we look at surgery and who should be having surgery, and how best to apply that.
The other is there’s a lot of focus on the root cause of disease. There’s a lot of chatter out there about that but I would say that a focus on that specifically … [is] on balance, a positive thing for patients and physicians. Who doesn’t want to get at what it is that’s making us sick, and how do we stay healthy? Even as a surgeon, how do we keep people from having spine surgery? There’s always going to be a need for people to have surgery, but the hope is that we’re really going to be applying that in very focused cases, and for the vast majority of people that experience the very, very common symptom of back pain. My hope is that it’s only the small minority of people that have [back pain] who are going to really need surgery. So looking at the root cause of this, how to get people out of a sedentary lifestyle, how to get people eating better, how to get people moving again. I think those are all net positives.
