As spine procedures continue to trend toward the outpatient setting, patients are becoming more empowered to take an active role in managing their well-being and deciding where to have procedures performed, Yesh Navalgund, MD, said.
Dr. Navalgund, chief medical officer of Rockville, Md.-based National Spine & Pain Centers, joined the "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" to discuss what's next for outpatient spine surgery.
Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: What are two to three trends that you're really paying close attention to in the ASC and spine space?
Dr. Yesh Navalgund: The top things that come to my mind in terms of trends in the ASC space are technological advancements, a shift towards outpatient procedures and specialization and niche services within the ASC. So when we talk about technological advancements, what I'm really talking about is how ASCs are looking at and increasingly adopting advanced technologies to enhance patient care, particularly to streamline operations and improve efficiencies. There's a lot of ways to do this, but one of the things that I've seen very frequently happening is the use of telemedicine for preoperative and post-operative care, as well as robots within the actual procedure suites for certain surgical procedures.
When we talk about that shift towards outpatient procedures, we've seen that trend over the past decade, but we're seeing a significant uptick. What I feel is the reason for that uptick is advances in the actual medical technology of the devices that we use. We look at the medical technology and the techniques, we see that these newer technologies allow safer and more efficient outpatient surgery, obviously leading to cost savings for both patients and payers.
When we talk about specialization I'm in one of those niche services, pain management. But what I found is that other surgical specialties like orthopedics, which have traditionally been more hospital based due to, again, the advancements in technology and techniques now allowing joint replacements and other more complex procedures to actually take place in an outpatient setting.
Q: When you're looking ahead, is there any kind of next big wave or evolution in tech in relation to some of these higher acuity procedures in the outpatient space?
YN: There's a tremendous shift. Where I'm seeing the greatest technological advancements has really been in the in the interventional pain side procedures that were typically handled and managed in hospital settings, such as sacroiliac joint fusion, has now advanced to a minimally invasive procedure that not only from an orthopedic perspective is being performed, but neurosurgical as well as interventional pain management.
But what I'm really excited about is all this advancement in technology really empowers patients. Patients now have a significantly more active role in managing their well-being. What we find is that they're out there looking at all of these opportunities and seeing where they can get these procedures done and finding more and more that they're being done in these outpatient settings. Patients are actually demanding that.