George Ozoude, MD, founder of Movement Orthopaedic Institute in Houston, has a unique practice model where the challenges now could lead to tailwinds down the road.
His practice utilizes a direct-pay care model, meaning that he doesn't have direct contracts with insurers. Dr. Ozoude joined the "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" to discuss that system and how he decided to leverage it.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: When you look ahead into 2025, can you give us a little bit of insight into the biggest headwinds that you're planning and preparing for?
Dr. George Ozoude: With my niche model there are very particular, unique headwinds that I face. It's not a very common model. A lot of patients and employers aren't used to it. It takes a lot of educating on the front end for folks who are not aware of this model. It is a growing model, especially with the challenges that the entire medical landscape is facing, with higher costs of healthcare, more complexities and delivering care in terms of access and quality. I believe those headwinds actually spell some tailwinds for me because there will be higher influx and demand for this type of model where we have more predictable accessibility as well as costs.
But on the headwind side [the model] is so new that it does require a lot of educating and marketing. One big area where I need to market is to large and mid-sized employers, specifically HR and benefits companies. Sometimes it's even necessary to get in front of the CFO or CEO in order to explain the model and its benefits. Those are the biggest headwinds for me over the past three years, and I continue to see them being headwinds because it's not a common model. There's ecosystems that are growing around this model. We still have a ways to go, but it's definitely headed in the right direction. I didn't have to worry about that in my prior practice, but putting on my marketing hat and getting the word out is the big obstacle for me.
Q: When you were deciding to start your own practice [three years ago], how did you land on this model?
GO: So within the first two to three years you start to kind of see how the sauce is made in the factory so to speak. That's what led me to see the writing on the wall and where things were headed. That spurred me to try to look for alternate routes of delivering care and keeping my own physician autonomy. I really came across this model through Keith Smith, MD, at Surgery Center of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. He's been doing this with his surgery center for more than 25 years. It's the first that I heard of it, and it really made sense to me. It was clear. It was simple. That's the biggest thing this model simplifies, the care delivery challenges that I see in medicine.
That was around my third or fourth year of practice, and I always thought if I really wanted to obtain and maintain my autonomy, I would probably have to do something like this. Investing outside of medicine gave me the soft landing to go out there and take a risk and try this model. It really is just a patient-physician relationship driven type of endeavor and trying to eliminate as many middlemen that get between that relationship as possible. That's where this all comes from.