Becker's ASC Review

38 ORTHOPEDICS New PE-backed spine device company targets ASC surgeons By Alan Condon Inspan merged with Sacrix to form Insrix, a new spine device company, effective July 1. Insrix's immediate goal is to hire a CEO "to lead and build a new executive and sales team to grow the revenues and prepare the company for an exit," KICVentures Group co-founder and CFO Aditya Humad said in an Aug. 1 news release. KICVentures is the investment holding company with majority ownership in Inspan and Sacrix, which led to a quick decision on the merger. KICVentures sees the transaction as an opportunity to boost ASC efficiency for surgeons treating degenerative spine disease such as spinal stenosis and sacroiliac disease. Insrix, the combined entity, will accelerate growth in 2023, when it is expected that sacroiliac joint companies that place a wedge inside the joint posteriorly will see a new category III T-code that could negatively affect reimbursement for posterior wedges, according to KICVentures. Inspan is focused on training physicians on treating degenerative spinal stenosis and fusing the spine without interbody cages and pedicle screws. Sacrix, meanwhile, is focused on training surgeons on its new percutaneous lateral-oblique sacroiliac joint fusion technique. "Having both companies together provides doctors with complementary companies to more efficiently support outpatient spine surgery," Kingsley Chin, MD, spine surgeon and chair and CEO of KICVentures, said in the release. n Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic adding multiple locations, physicians By Alan Condon T allahassee (Fla.) Orthopedic Clinic is adding two locations and bolstering its team of surgeons, 850 Business Magazine reported Sept. 18. TOC Panama City will open in October and TOC Panama City Beach is expected to open in fall of 2024, the report said. The Panama City Beach facility, developed in conjunction with Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare and Tallahassee-based Florida State University College of Medicine, will be located on the second floor of an 80,000-square-foot building. The facility will include primary care on the first floor, cardiovascular on the third and surgical care on the fourth, the report said. Both new locations will offer services including joint reconstruction, sports medicine, regenerative medicine, diagnostic imaging, hand and wrist care, foot and ankle care, pain management, orthotics and prosthetics, shoulder and elbow care, pediatric orthopedics, concussion care, spine and back, trauma and physical therapy. Orthopedic sports medicine specialist Eric Branch, MD, pediatric orthopedic specialist Ryan Price, MD, and foot and ankle specialist Andy Borom, MD, will join the surgical team at the Panama City location, the report said. n same umbrella as the practice. "For all practices, ancillaries are becoming a bigger piece of the business. We're getting less in professional fees, working harder for less money. We [need to] figure out ancillaries, which would include all the usual ancillaries — therapy, MRI, imaging, but also surgery centers," Frank Phillips, MD, director of spine surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, told Becker's. "We decided to [scale] through organic growth with partners, basically putting in retained earnings, which is obviously not the traditional way orthopedic or medical practices function, and use that to grow our footprint both in terms of geography and in terms of developing ancillary streams." 4. Maintaining independence. Another key challenge for independent orthopedic groups is maintaining their autonomy. is has driven many small and medium-size practices to merge into "supergroups," which benefit from greater economies of scale, sharing financial risk and a larger seat at the table when negotiating contracts with payers. Other orthopedic practices are partnering with private equity firms, which has seen a significant uptick in the specialty in recent years, and some are joining hospitals and health systems. However, this can mean sacrificing some autonomy when it comes to patient care, which independent surgeons do not want to do. In addition, when major hospitals and corporations acquire physician practices, especially primary care, this not only increases the cost of care but also decreases the referral to that community's orthopedic surgeons. Instead, those primary care practices have to refer to the hospital or corporate system in their network. "e last decade or two we've seen reductions in reimbursements for professional services while reimbursements have stayed high on the facility side. At the same time, overhead has gone up, such as malpractice insurance, information systems and compliance. ese things are very costly, and that's decreased the margins that an independent orthopedic group operates under," Ed Hellman, MD, president and interim CEO of Indianapolis-based OrthoIndy, told Becker's. "Successful groups have found ways to develop ancillary income streams, whether it's ownership of therapy or imaging centers or surgery centers. In our case, we have a physician-owned hospital that's part of that as well, and that has allowed us to stay independent of the major health systems." n

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