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pod. Best. This is Chanel Bun with the
Becker Healthcare care podcast and I'm recording live
at the Becker Healthcare care 20 first Annual
Spine orthopedic and pain management Driven As.
Plus the future of Spine Conference. And right
now, I'm sitting down with doctor Scott Blu,
the founder for Ci disc replacement,
And a spine surgeon at the Texas Back
Institute, Doctor. Blu. Thank you so much for
joining me today. Thank you. It's it's good
to be back and sorry about that mouthful
of introduction.
Well, to get us started, could you please
tell us a little bit about your background
and your organizations?
Yeah. So
I've been doing this for many, many years.
We started the center for disc replacement.
Oh, gosh It's it's been over 10 years.
Now based upon the fact that a subset
of Tb,
the center for disc replacement really focused on
this particular unique technology.
That started out as fairly niche technology.
At least in the cervical spine now. It
it's definitely more well accepted.
Applicable
to outpatient or ambulatory surgery.
And
you know, we we... We've seen it mature
over the years and since we started with
the original Fda trials almost 25 years ago.
Perfect. And you kind of already touched on
it a little bit, but what makes the
center for placement
unique.
So we are the first
focused
practice, at least the subset of the practice.
That's the center for disc replacement
on exactly that.
We do about 50 50
lumbar and and cervical.
We're starting to to say interestingly the enough
and and death. I'll I'll segue into what's
different between last year and and this year,
we're starting to see the need for revision
surgery. I mean, the cervical spot.
And this really came about
just sitting around the the the lounge and
talking to my hip and knee colleagues
about joint replacement. And they said, well, you
know,
what do you do when when either they
wear out or they failed or if there's
other issues?
And you know, Always said, well, you know,
when a disc replacement fails, the the bailout
allowed us to do fusion.
And they said, well, why don't we just
do a revision. We do revision hips and
knees all the time,
and it got me thinking, and we started
to see some patients now probably 567
years ago.
That
questioned
the fusion and said, why can't you just
put another disk in? So we tried
and in certain circumstances
it actually is is a better mouse strap.
So we're not having to fuse every disc
that we take out.
We're able to replace this. And there certain
discs on the market that are better
for replacements.
And and and I'm talking really now about
the cervical spine lumbar as a whole another
realm
Cervical spine has taken off and and even
Becker has projected the market with a 12
to 15 percent growth year after year.
And it's a huge multi billion dollar market,
but if there's hundreds of thousands being done,
there's gonna be a small percentage that need
to be revised.
In fact, we looked at our numbers at
the Tb well over a thousand, and we
found the revision rate to be less than
1 and a half percent.
Yes, it's small, but with hundred of thousands
being done,
people who
dev devote or at least focus some of
their pro us Are gonna need to deal
with this. So that's really what's happened in
the last year. It's very, very exciting.
That does sound exciting.
And in your practice, do you have any
notable partnership?
Texas Back Institute partnered with HCA few years
back. And
we've helped
grow
their footprint in spine in North Texas,
and I can't even tell you how many
hospitals and how many offices we've had, but
our footprint extends with them
probably 3 to 30, 40, 50 miles from
the epicenter or Tb, which isn't in plano.
And do you have any advice for other
physician leaders that are looking to start their
own practice?
This is a tough market.
The forces have really aligned themselves
against... Get private practice,
particularly
small group, private practice singles, doubles, triples.
I think if you're gonna make a go
of it in private practice,
you need to have economy scale. You need
to have
probably
multi specialty.
You know, and and then it's not a
terrible thing.
To have
hospital partners in your community, particularly, you know,
if if they're... If they have a good
foothold in the community
Very big, doctor Blu. And I thank you
for your time today. But before I let
you go, is there anything else that our
listeners should know?
We're hanging in there. You know, as you
can see, There's a lot of challenges for
health care, and and, you know, like, you
1 of my mentors said, just quality, patient
focused, and there's always room at the top.
Absolutely. Well I wanna thank you Once again
for your time today and for joining me
on the Health care podcast. Thank you Thank
you.