Private equity in spine and orthopedics has grown in the private practice space, but hospital employed surgeons are also thinking about the larger implications in the field.
Spine surgeons Max Kahn, MD, and Sohail Syed, MD, of Peoria, Ill.-based OSF HealthCare discussed the trends they're thinking about.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity.
Q: What healthcare trends have you been following recently?
MK: One thing that I have been keeping an eye on is the role of private equity in healthcare lately. I think their footprint and control is growing, and it worries me a little bit about how that's going to pan out for patients first, physicians second and hospitals third.
Q: Coming from hospital employment, how are you thinking about the way this could affect surgeons like yourself?
MK: My main concern is twofold. It seems to me that the logical progression of how these trends go is that they obtain a foothold and then begin cost cutting measures to try to improve the profit margin. I worry that it will start to slash into some of these technologies that we're utilizing. They're interested in the bare minimum to get surgery done. The other part of it is like, how it will affect patients. Our costs are just simply passed on to them with surprise medical bills.
Q: Dr. Syed, how are you thinking about private equity and any other healthcare trends you're following?
SS: I agree with Dr. Khan. A lot of negative patient outcomes or experiences are not very easily financially representable, and there's not necessarily a cost to anyone other than the patient with those. Things like increased pain after surgery aren't going to be registered as a ding against the healthcare system in a way that would actually affect the hospital's reimbursement. I can imagine these firms being focused on cutting those sorts of things where it's not optimal patient experience, but no one's measuring it, and it's a way to skimp out. I think it will have implications on patients. Even just in terms of an operations perspective, it might not have a clear financial impact, but if it's cheaper, they're going to make that change even if it adds more time to the or makes a surgery more technically challenging.
On the positive side of things I'm excited to see how more and more integration of artificial intelligence will hopefully improve some of the administrative overhead and clutter around EMRs. Even with the best EMRs, there's a lot of redundant information or information that's important that gets hidden. Better integration of some AI tasks that can streamline things, pick up what particular surgeons particularly want to know and will be a great efficiency improvement.