Q: How has your orthopedic and sports medicine practice evolved over the years?
Dr. Hythem Shadid: Compared to 20 years ago, I’m seeing more middle aged athletes who demand more from sports medicine physicians. Years ago, sports medicine focused more on high school and college athletes. Cultural changes including an emphasis on fitness has brought an increased need for sports medicine in the middle age group. I am seeing people in the 5th and even 6th decade of life continuing to challenge themselves physically and are frustrated by the limitations due to injuries.
Here’s an example from my own life: while playing intramural flag football in college, I twisted my knee and felt a “pop.” A week later I visited orthopedic surgeon for the first time. His initial question to me was “what are you studying son?” I responded, “mechanical engineering.” “Good,” he replied, “because you’re never going to be an athlete.” I laugh at that exchange now, because some of the best athletes in the world have had ACL reconstructions, a procedure that was not developed until a few years after my injury, and have returned to MVP form. These advances allow me to repair the ACLs of active middle-age individuals quite often. This is just one characterization of the changes in sports medicine over time that I didn’t have access to while in college.
Another change has been in how we market our practice to patients. Whereas once upon a time we tried to promote our practice as the biggest and the best, we’ve learned a lesson from the hospitality industry and focus more on patient loyalty and existing patient referrals. We are focusing more on our relationships with our patients. At the end of the day we are focusing more on how the patient feels about themselves after a visit to our office rather than how they feel about us.
Q: How are you implementing this new marketing strategy?
HS: We are putting more emphasis on recruiting and training of staff. We need to equip them with the skills they need to be patient-centered. An example of that is a shift to focus more on things that matter to the patient such as timeliness, i.e. reducing wait times. We are equipping staff with technology and rewarding them to improve workflow from a patient’s perspective.
In the field of orthopedics, we’ve done a good job of providing quality care across the country so the product we deliver is not only good, but also fairly consistent. A persistent challenge however is finding a way to deliver our product in a more convenient friendly way. Along with decreasing wait times, we also have to do a better job with patient education. By the end of the visit our patients need to feel that they are cared for and if we can succeed in that then our patients will be our best ambassadors.
Q: Where do you see your practice headed to continue success over the next five years?
HS: I’m representing an independent, solo, practice i.e. we are not corporately owned. Corporate medicine is the dominate player in our marketplace. As such, we can no longer count on employed primary care physicians as the primary referral base for our practice. The majority of our referrals are now coming from our existing community of patients. We are now spending more resources on innovative ways to stay connected to our existing patient base. Our existing patient base and their stories are now our most important marketing resource.
At our strategy meetings we look at more than just clinical data, we also try to identify data that helps us assess how we are doing in communicating our message. Coming up with measurables on messaging is just as hard as measuring quality clinical orthopedic care. While we celebrate our patient satisfaction scores, we recognize that is not enough and it does not necessarily lead to friend and family referrals. Sometimes we simply have to do the hard work of asking our patients for direct feedback on how we are doing and we have learned a great bit from that exercise. That is an example of how we use our existing patient base is our best resource to maintain stability in our changing marketplace.
The other thing that we will need to continue success over the coming years is to raise the value of being constant learners. We need to be on top of newer treatment options because our sports medicine patients will settle for nothing less than the best our profession has to offer. We spend lots of time traveling and learning from colleagues in the sports medicine field.
Q: What is your biggest concern that keeps you up at night?
HS: The biggest concern might be the economic concerns. We are living in an environment of declining reimbursement for office-based services both for physician time and for expensive technologically advanced diagnostics. In our market, hospital based services are reimbursed three to four times higher than our services. That additional revenue can be used to subsidize employed physician salaries. We on the other hand have to depend on innovative and entrepreneurial thinking if we are going to provide better care and service at a lower cost than corporate medical systems. In the existing environment independent practices like ours have more incentive to provide great quality care at a fraction of the cost compared to corporate healthcare systems. If necessity is the mother of invention then the upside of our financial constraint is the opportunity to innovate and I think we are in a better position to do that. It is this necessity that ignites a passion in many of our staff to invent new ways of delivering care that is beneficial to all our patients.
Learn more from Dr. Hythem Shadid at the 15th Annual Spine, Orthopedic & Pain Management-Driven ASC Conference + The Future of Spine in June 2017! Click here for more information.
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