Alexander Vaccaro, MD, PhD, MBA, President of Rothman Orthopaedics
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What is the main focus of Dr. Vaccaro's role at Rothman Orthopaedics?
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast. I'm Sophie Atis, orthopedic reporter with Becker's Healthcare, and today we're honored to be joined by Dr. Alexander Vaquero, one of the most respected leaders in spine surgery and orthopedic care. He serves as president of Rothman Orthopedics and is the Richard H. Rothman Professor and Chairman of Orthopedic Surgery, as well as Professor of Neurosurgery at Thomas Jefferson University. Dr. Vaccaro's career spans clinical excellence, academic leadership, and health system strategy. His work in spine trauma and research has helped shape modern spine care, earning the trust of surgeons, institutions, and patients around the world.
In this episode, we're going to explore what lies ahead for orthopedic and spine care in 2026, from innovation and workforce evolution to leadership lessons and the strategic growth of one of the nation's largest orthopedic platforms. Dr. Vaccaro, we're so happy to have you. So to start, I'll give you the opportunity to introduce yourself and also share a bit about your role.
I am a professor of orthopedic surgery and neurosurgery.
I'm the chairman of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University and the Sidney Kimmel Medical Center. And I'm the president of the Rothman Institute. And my role at Jefferson in terms of my clinical responsibilities is that I'm one of the many spine surgeons. And we have a great bunch of guys here that do research. We teach medicine.
spinal care, and we serve the southeastern Pennsylvania community, northern Delaware, southern New Jersey, and those that want to travel far and near to have service at the Rothman Institute. That's my current role at the present time.
Awesome. Well, with that, we'll dive right into it. Obviously, we're coming upon a new year here. So as you look ahead to 2026, can you talk a little bit about just what's top of mind for you? What some of those opportunities and headwinds that you're looking out for are?
So here's the battle.
not interested in an employed model, who understands the concept of risk.
I mean, if you join a healthcare system today, you basically join a risk-free compensation model. Risk-free. The more bricks you break, the more RVUs you generate, the more you get paid.
And I'm not sure that's in the best interest
So we try to give doctors the opportunity to be innovative in the care they provide, to have the flexibility and autonomy they need, and that's what represents private practice. So that's my opportunity. Another opportunity is the ability outside of a hospital-employed system to have opportunities
specialty hospitals, ancillary lines, and there's so many different creative, productive ancillary lines all the way up until concierge medicine that you can provide.
And these are things that the employee model really does not allow the individual surgeons to aid or
productivity standards are. So have everyone in our group work at the level of their license. If you're a PA and you're licensed to do certain things in my group, you should be doing those things.
You shouldn't be relegated to a medical assistant. You shouldn't be relegated to a secretarial role. You should actually be out there doing what you need to do. And we try to maximize everyone's schedule.
I mean, if you want to be part-time teaching, part-time research, that's fine. But the times that you have allocated to these roles, we want to make sure that you're efficient and you get things done and we have to make it so you can be efficient. And then the last opportunity I think is really taking advantage of advanced technology.
So I hate to say the buzzword agentic AI, but that's the buzzword now because I use it literally multiple times every day in everything I use. And not only in the business side to decrease employment costs, robotics so we're using advanced technologies to not only make surgery safer more accurate more precise but more reproducible but also in terms of our business you know responding when we get our submissions for
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