Nicholas Grosso, MD, is the president of The Bethesda, Md.-based Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics.
Dr. Grosso will serve on the panel "The Next Move for Orthopedic and Spine Supergroups" at Becker's 19th Annual Spine, Orthopedic & Pain Management-Driven ASC Conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from June 16-18.
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Question: What issues are you spending most of your time on today?
Dr. Nicholas Grosso: We officially launched MedVanta, the first advanced orthopedics-created MSO in the marketplace, to help private practitioners who want to remain independent of [private equity] and hospital systems. Since we just launched, that's been keeping me pretty busy. Other than that, what keeps me busy is the same thing that keeps any other leader of a large medical group busy: trying to deal with current challenges and the ones we see on the horizon. With that, we try to position our surgeons, physicians and providers to continue providing the care they want in that private practice setting.
Q: What are your top challenges and how will they change over the next 12 months?
NG: Cybersecurity and compliance, I think, are the two biggest ones. Beyond cybersecurity, however, is the continuing consolidation across all of medicine, specifically the musculoskeletal sector. We see PE entering the marketplace to acquire groups as well. We are committed to staying private, not taking any PE money, and allowing our doctors to continue to practice private-practice medicine as they see fit. That's a big challenge. There's lots of competition; many people with deep pockets are coming after us. They want to do something with us, and at this point, we're just not interested.
The second big thing on the horizon is the changes in medicine involving value-based care. That's great and we welcome that. We would love not to have to come back to those payers every time we want to get an MRI scan or get a preapproval and everything else. To succeed at that, you need a significant infrastructure. Smaller groups, seven, eight, nine, 10 guys, they just can't afford to build the infrastructure that they need to succeed at risk. One of the reasons we started MedVanta is that we've been successful since 2014. We've had the wherewithal to spend carefully to build the infrastructure we feel we need to go forward.
We want to be that third way, so practices could stay in their private practice model, stay independent, make their own decisions, and be basically in charge of their own destiny.
Q: How are you thinking about investments and growth in the next two years?
NG: For CAO, we will rely on MedVanta to provide us with those facilities and the infrastructure we need to win at risk. We'll be spending a lot of time and money at the MedVanta level building out that infrastructure. For years now, we've built CAO from the ground up. We always started with trusted, valued consulting partners to provide services for us until we got to the point where we thought, okay, now, we're ready to take that particular segment in-house and hire someone to do it.
Q: What are you most excited about right now?
NG: Well, great risk brings great opportunity. Things are always changing and you can't be excited without being a little frightened. We're very excited about the opportunities out there because if we can deliver, we can do what we know we can do. We're very confident we can also turn around and do that for other groups. If we can deliver on that, I think we will change medicine. As I said, those groups don't have many options right now. They struggle to stay independent and by themself. However, we're hoping that MedVanta is going to supply them or provide them with a third way; a way that they can maintain that independence, at least as much as possible in partnering with a group that's made up of like-minded physicians who are not holding up by financiers or Wall Street or hospitals.