James Mooney, MD, is thinking ahead about the future of healthcare from ways AI can support his work as a minimally invasive and complex spine surgeon to a shift toward value-based care.
Dr. Mooney, of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, discussed the top spine and healthcare trends he’s watching during an upcoming episode of the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast.”
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: What are some of the biggest spine trends that you’re following in healthcare?
Dr. James Mooney: With any field, artificial intelligence is at the forefront of everyone’s minds. From my standpoint as a complex spine surgeon, I think about the number of ways AI is going to assist us in the operating room. There’s a number of categories as far as planning for bigger spine deformity surgeries. That ranges from radiographic planning to the execution of complex spine surgeries. Ultimately, I think we’re heading toward the future where every surgery is ultimately planned and executed according to evidence-based algorithms. That’s where AI can help us choose who to operate on, help us construct our surgical plans and help us execute the plan and monitor our progress.
The next frontier for artificial intelligence and in healthcare as a whole is incorporating these AI paradigms into our clinical decisionmaking. Right now if you ask five different spine surgeons, you know how to approach a case, you might get five different answers. So how do we utilize AI to help standardize decisionmaking for spine surgeons and help choose the best option for each unique patient? I also think it’s important to monitor the safety of these algorithms and have resources that are devoted to making sure these technologies are used safely. That’s the No. 1 area I’m following.
No. 2 is the shift from RVU-based metrics toward value-based care, and specifically for spine surgery it’s important to make sure the right surgeries are being done for the right patients … Registries and health system analytics will help us progress toward that point where we’re determining which patients are benefiting from which surgery and rewarding surgeons for their outcomes.
Lastly, an area that’s been a particular interest to me is the expansion of minimally invasive as well as patient-specific technologies and precision medicine for spine surgery. The growth of ultra-minimally invasive surgery and endoscopic spine surgery is really interesting. They’ve been doing it in Asia for long periods of time, but in the U.S. it’s relatively new. But I think it’s something that’s here to stay, and it’s important for a center that provides spine care to be able to offer the full gamut of care ranging from the most minimally invasive approach to a big deformity correction. Tailoring that surgery specific to the patient is incredibly important, and we can’t lose sight of that.
