Reflecting on the first half of 2022, two orthopedic surgeons told Becker's their proudest achievements so far.
Ask Orthopedic Surgeons is a weekly series of questions posed to surgeons around the country about clinical, business and policy issues affecting orthopedic care. We invite all orthopedic surgeon and specialist responses.
Next question: What's your top goal for the remainder of 2022?
Please send responses to Carly Behm at cbehm@beckershealthcare.com by 5 p.m. CDT Wednesday, July 27.
Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What's your biggest accomplishment in the first half of the year?
Philip Louie, MD. Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (Seattle): This has been a chaotic first half the year from a local, national and international perspective. Despite all this, our team has persisted to pursue improvements in patient care as well as grow our research and academic footprint.
Clinically, we have continued to extend how we engage our patients with growth to surrounding suburban sites, video recording patient visits, providing new educational videos regarding treatments, and redeveloping our postoperative patient engagement and communication tools. As chaos surrounds us, we are finding different ways to support our patients during their spine care.
Academically, we have grown our mentorship and research programs to include students of various levels of training and developed a consistent regional Seattle-area spine journal club that includes more than 10 spine groups and medical centers!
Jeffrey Gum, MD. Norton Leatherman Spine Center (Louisville, Ky.): My biggest accomplishment so far this year would have to be getting nominated for the Scoliosis Research Society's Hibbs award and North American Spine Society's best paper award for the same abstract. The abstract is titled "Opioid Sparing Anesthesia for Adult Spinal Deformity Surgery Reduces Postoperative Pain, Length of Stay, ICU Stay, Opioid Consumption, and Opioid-Related Complications: A Propensity Matched Analysis."
Over the last three to four years we have really pushed to minimize opioids in spine surgery and feel like we have made huge progress. This work is a large collaboration with our anesthesia team. At our center we feel very strongly that opioid minimization should be a high priority. The widespread interest in this work is very exciting.