This past March, Anthony Yeung, MD, founder of Desert Institute for Spine Care in Phoenix, and his wife Eileen, announced they would donate $2.5 million to develop a comprehensive spine center at his alma mater, the University of New Mexico. The new center will allow him to continue his work in endoscopic laser spine surgery as a professor of spine surgery at the University and pass his techniques on to the next generation of spine surgeons.

Researchers led by Hyun Bae, MD, a spine surgeon with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, examined patients who underwent surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis from 2004 to 2009 from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a database developed as part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, and the findings were published in Spine.

Spinal fusions are a major procedure for patients and hospitals, and the amount charged for the procedure varies between $19,000 and more than $470,000.

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Last week, CMS released a trove of hospital inpatient billing data in an effort to increase price transparency. The data, which come from fiscal year 2011, detail charges and payments for the top 100 most frequently billed inpatient discharges for the 3,000-plus hospitals that are paid under Medicare's inpatient prospective payment system.

Here are the 10 hospitals that recorded the highest charges for spinal fusions in FY 2011. Note: Data come directly from CMS' database of hospital charges and reflects only hospitals paid under Medicare's IPPS. Data specifically reflects MS-DRG 460, spinal fusion except cervical, without major complications and comorbidities.

1.    Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County (Willingboro, N.J.): $471,121
2.    Pottstown (Pa.) Memorial Medical Center: $323,318
3.    North Hills Hospital (North Richland Hills, Texas): $306,773
4.    Northridge (Calif.) Hospital Medical Center: $304,564
5.    Washington Hospital (Fremont, Calif.): $296,766
6.    Vista Medical Center East (Waukegan, Ill.): $284,148
7.    Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital (Whittier, Ga.): $282,889
8.    Santa Rosa (Calif.) Memorial Hospital: $280,517
9.    CJW Medical Center (Richmond, Va.): $279,767
10.    University of California Davis Medical Center (Sacramento): $269,846

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Richard Kube, MD, CEO of Prairie Spine & Pain Institute and Prairie SurgiCare in Peoria, Ill., tackles some of the big issues facing spine surgeons in private practice today and how surgeons can be successful in the 21st century.

This article was written by Dick Pepper, a medical marketing specialist who blogs at VoxMD.com and can be reached at dick This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Your reputation sucks, according to the internet. Or maybe it's great. But unless you manage your reputation and your online presence, it can go either way. Reputation management has jumped to the top of our awareness, and deservedly so. Pew Internet tells us that 44 percent of all patients are researching you, and one in five look at these rating sites. These numbers are too big to ignore. Dr. Hitham Khalil of Valdosta, Ga., says, "It's a trend, just like anything else, whether it's websites, medicine or Amazon. It's ratings, and most people look at them these days. Patients do look at these sites and I've had them tell me they looked me up."

A multicenter retrospective review of pediatric patients who underwent spinal instrumentation to correct scoliosis published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery examined the surgical site infection rate for different etiologies.

This article was written by Dick Pepper, a medical marketing specialist who blogs at VoxMD.com and can be reached at dick This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

When we read orthopedic publications, we often recognize many surgeon names as subject matter experts. In the field of search engines and optimization of websites, the biggest name that you've likely never heard is Matt Cutts, head of web spam at Google. He is behind the team that creates the technology that looks at your website and decides its value. That's a pretty powerful position to be in. Matt was recently asked what the top five mistakes were for optimizing websites to be found by Google search. These five mistakes are listed below, along with my commentary. Follow these guidelines to build the most "findable" website possible:

Tracking key benchmarks is important for spine surgeons to ensure their practice is headed in the right direction in the changing healthcare environment.

A study recently published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery discusses methods to avoid infection during posterior cervical spine surgery.

Here are five quick and easy ways to grow spine practice patient volume.