At heart, Michael Boblitz is a strategy guy, and when he began as CEO of Athens (Ga.) Orthopedic Clinic he quickly identified an area where the practice could save $2.5 million.
He said the practice’s strategic plan is built on four pillars: business transformation, strategic growth, partnerships and financial strength. When it comes to these pillars, a lot of headwinds including reimbursement pressures and inflation can pose a challenge to operating efficiently and at a lower price point.
Mr. Boblitz took a two-pronged approach focusing on labor and vendor spend, two of the biggest components of business, he said.
“I looked at all of our vendors, and quickly realized that there’s a lot of redundancy in vendors, and a lot of vendors that have been here for many, many years,” Mr. Boblitz said. “With vendors, if you don’t manage them well, once they get in they never leave. At one point the expense might have made sense, but when I got here, a lot of them didn’t. I quickly realized, just through attacking the vendor spend, I eliminated $2.5 million of cost, either through firing vendors that were no longer needed or replacing vendors.”
Some of the cost-saving changes Mr. Boblitz implemented include changing IT partners, moving to a national leading GPO to reduce supply costs, switching to lower-cost alternatives to pharmacy and ASC implant vendors and transitioning to a new legal firm for less complex projects.
Athens Orthopedic Clinic has 10 locations and a wide portfolio of services, and Mr. Boblitz said that thinking strategically about consolidating teams helped him tackle labor costs.
“We have a massive physical therapy division alone that is equal to or larger than some orthopedic private practices,” he said. “We have 39 therapy providers that took care of 81,000 patients last year, they had a lot of redundancy in services, and it was like they’re separate businesses. So I looked at consolidating that. For example they had a different data patient access manager and different front desk team members. We centralized all their services through a very aggressive reorganization to focus on efficiencies and economies. In 2025, we took care of 8,900 more patients with 32 fewer employees.”
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