Looking for a solution that helps alleviate administrative
tasks for your staff and also helps your
patients cover their out of pocket health care
expenses?
Find what you're looking for from CareCredit because
CareCredit is a credit card and more. It's
a helping hand for staff and a flexible
payment solution for patients. For over thirty years,
CareCredit, a Synchrony solution, has offered patients a
credit card with promotional financing options to get
the care they want while helping staff do
what they do best, provide care. To learn
more, visit carecredit.com
forward slash beckerspodcast.
This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are live at the twenty
second annual Spine Orthopedic and Pain Management Conference.
I'm currently joined by doctor Earl Kilbride, who
is an orthopedic surgeon at the Austin Orthopedic
Institute. So, doctor Kilbride, thanks for being here.
Let's start off by having you share a
little bit about yourself, your role in your
organization. Sure. My name is Earl Kilbride, MD.
I've been an orthopedic surgeon in Austin, Texas
since 02/2002.
I'm fellowship trained in sports medicine.
My practice consists of about a third trauma,
which I do in a hospital, a third
total joints, and a third sports medicine. The
latter,
two, I do mainly at a ASC or
a surgical hospital.
Wonderful. Well, thanks for taking the time to
be here. And let's start our conversation with
what trends or shifts you're currently seeing in
the industry that you think are most important
for industry leaders to pay attention to.
So one trend that's been in particular,
that I've watched over the past twenty years
or so is the employed model, whether it's
private equity or hospital employment. I'm still in
a small group. I was in a big
group, and, we peeled off to form a
small group. We currently are five.
And in that sense, I think,
we have to really watch to maintain our
volume. We have to watch to maintain our
contracts.
The hospitals tend
to be able to, put more money to
marketing, put more money to primary care physicians.
And so that's been something that really, we
keep in the radar.
And staffing and workforce challenges also continue to
be a concern across health care sectors. So
how is your organization navigating these pressures, and
what strategies have you seen work well?
Yeah. So it's a difficult scenario, right, because
our reimbursements are going down, so we just
can't keep throwing money at staffing,
because
that makes them even sort of
more fluid in the sense that they'll leave
you for a dollar more an hour. And
so I think what you have to do
is create culture and create stickiness in your
organization. You have to treat people right. You
have to make sure that they have adequate
time to do their job.
You let them off. Our employees don't work
Friday afternoons. And so it's things like that
that we hope to keep them around as
opposed to just continuing to throw money at
them.
100%.
And as outpatient care continues to grow, how
do you see the role of orthopedics
evolving within the broader health care ecosystem?
Yeah. I think ASCs are not gonna go
anywhere. I think a lot of the hospital
systems initially thought they would just hopefully go
away, but you can see Ascension is in
the process of buying AMSURGE. And so that's
just evidence that a big health care system
needs an ASC system to go along with
it. And so from our standpoint, I think
it's gonna complement the inpatient care very well,
and probably more and more of it's gonna
move to the outpatient setting just as Medicare
has
allowed for some of the inpatient only coasts
and now become outpatient as well, such as
total shoulder replacements.
And finally, many organizations are exploring new technologies,
partnerships, and care models to improve efficiency and
outcomes. So are there any innovations or initiatives
you found particularly promising?
Well, I think unlike most orthopedists, I actually
think there's an initiative that we have to
report patient reported outcomes,
in total knee replacements. I actually think it's
a good thing. I think it's gonna objectify
some of the data.
Some of the partnerships that we do is
we try to go one on one with
certain businesses like Whole Foods
or Concentra, the work comp system, and we
avoid the middleman such as the insurance companies
to really try to work to get a
partnership with them,
and keep things streamlined.
Absolutely.
Was there anything else you'd like to share
that we didn't touch on today? Yeah. The
only other thing I would say in the
ASC setting is I in addition to moving
more volume over, I think the case mix
is changing. The acuity levels are getting higher,
but there's also some other procedures that we
are pretty much limited to the ASC.
I do a lot of peripheral neuromodulation,
which is a little bit odd for an
orthopedist to do. There's plenty of back surgeons,
whether it's neurosurgery or orthopedic surgery, that do
spinal cord stimulation. And so some of these
procedures aren't really,
reimbursed
even above cost in a hospital setting, and
so they have to come to the ASC.
Well, doctor Kilbride, thanks so much for joining
me today on the Becker's healthcare podcast to
share these insights. Again, we are recording live
at the twenty second annual Spine Orthopedic and
Pain Management Conference.
Thank you.