Frank D. Vrionis

Pain management, rehabilitation, things like that.

So growth is through people, but also through new technologies, robotics, augmented reality, things like that.

As well as research, we have been fortunate to receive, especially today's day where research dollars are very difficult to find, we have been able to receive research funds from the Marcus Foundation, which is a philanthropic organization.

Foundation, and through that we pursue research in domains such as brain tumor research, drug delivery, spine research, so on and so forth.

So these are the areas where we see a lot of

potential expansion and growth and we like to stay current and on the cutting edge of things.

What I've been very excited about in spine, especially without trying to get into too many details and being esoteric, is the motion preservation technology.

technology that has been has become part of my practice inspiring on a daily basis and as you know in spine we have essentially two types of procedures just to be very simple here simplistic we can decompress something or free up something or we can do reconstruct

the spine.

Reconstructing the spine typically has been the domain of fusions where you glue together pieces of the spine.

This works in the short term, but in the long term, a lot of times people develop problems

above or below their fusions because of the stresses that develop adjacent to a fused segment of the spine.

So motion preservation in the sense of disc replacement as well as facet replacement,

has been a thing that really can restore the motion segment and prevent this domino effect that we see with fusions and stop that particular cascade of more segments that need to be fused that lead to lack of mobility and certainly disability in the end.

I mean, the issue is more or less the indications as well as what can you do because many times our biggest problem actually with motion preservation is getting insurance approval.

A lot of insurance companies, they consider it experimental despite the fact that

There's like decades of research and pretty much everything that we use is FDA approved.

So when something is FDA approved, I don't know how people can claim that it's experimental.

But insurance denials is a big obstacle to utilizing these technologies.

I think, especially for young people, you would like to do as much motion preservation operations instead of fusions.