Building a top-notch spine surgery fellowship takes time, but this surgeon is looking to set a new standard for how fellowships train young surgeons.
Ronjon Paul, MD, a spine surgeon who joined Endeavor Health in 2025 after more than two decades with DuPage Medical Group, recently connected with Becker’s to talk about the reasoning behind his move, his goals at Endeavor and the importance of personalized care.
Dr. Paul is working with Mark Nolden, MD, and Lukas Zabala, MD, who are set to serve as directors for the Spine Fellowship and Endeavor Health Medical Group.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: Why did you decide to begin providing care at Endeavor Health?
Dr. Ronjon Paul: I was in practice for 22 years with DuPage Medical Group, and started a practice from scratch. We built a multidisciplinary ecosystem and brought in more multidisciplinary players in physiatry, pain medicine and other spine surgeons, for example. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to shift gears. The spine program that I had built was primarily built in the early 2000s and flourished in the 2010s. We’re in a very different marketplace, different economic factors, different technologies and different demands on the part of patients, which are highly appropriate. So this is the next iteration that we’re starting now, and I’m very excited about it.
We’re now building upon a great ecosystem at Endeavor Health Medical Group. They have a great spine center in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and we want to closely work with them and work off of that rubric and build that on a systemwide level. We’re taking that original model using what I learned over 22 years and are now going to build a bigger, larger platform and a bigger program throughout Chicago. There is a lot of economic effort being put into this, a lot of leadership and new novel ideas going into it. I think that the need to teach and the need to pass on a lot of what we’re doing here has become paramount, so we’re putting together a fellowship. That fellowship is going to be starting off in 2027; it’s going to be a systemwide fellowship. The plan is to have it be the premier fellowship in Chicago.
Q: What goals do you have for the spine fellowship program?
RP: The fellowship is really designed to go a few steps beyond what traditional, top-notch spine fellowships do. Those top-notch fellowships give their fellows excellent technical skills. They should have a really great knowledge of spine indications, really understand how to work through the clinic and the operating room, and have those basic underpinnings to go on and have a great career. We believe that’s the bare minimum for a spine fellowship.
What the end goal is in three years, even hopefully earlier than that, is that people look at the Endeavor Health spine fellowship and they say that’s somebody that will do well. In my program, I will want to hire that fellow. They are a top-notch fellowship. The way we do that is clearly at a minimum, offering that breadth of outstanding surgical mentorship. But also, we’re in a different environment now than we were when I came out of fellowship in the early 2000s and that is, you need to be able to work with complex, large organizations. Most medical students and residents don’t learn that you have to understand how to navigate the financial realities of how to become financially viable, how to garner resources that you and your team needs and how to lead a multidisciplinary team. From what I’m also seeing, those are skills that are essential to really becoming successful as a spine surgeon, along with all the technical gifts that are required to really flourish in the operating room.
Q: What is the importance of providing a holistic and personalized approach to spine care, especially with the rise of outpatient settings?
RP: The patient and the family need to be very well informed. A lot of our lumbar fusions years ago, you would spend three four days in the hospital. Now we’ll do a fairly large case and send them home the next day. That’s technically not outpatient surgery, but you still have a lot of the same issues involved. Patients need to understand their limitations, they need to have the situation and support set up at home so that way they can go home the next day after having what can be considered a large spine operation.
Looking at that overall context is especially important as we move forward; I think it’s as important as the technology. I think it may be even more important than technology. That’s why you have to have very emotionally intelligent spine surgeons. The staff needs to be working as a team and understand the needs of patients. That’s something that we are driving into our program. Being able to build those kinds of processes, look at patients in that very special way and build a program that mentors surgeons to move forward are several of the reasons I made the career change a year ago.
