Dr. William Kemp on Innovations in Spine Surgery and Patient-Centered Care
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This is Carly Beam with the Becker Spine and Orthopedics Podcast, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr. William Kemp, spine surgeon with Neurosurgical Associates. Dr. Kemp, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me, Carly. Happy to be here.
So, Dr. Kemp, before we dive into our questions, can you introduce yourself, share a bit more about your background?
Sure. I'm a board-certified, fellowship-trained spine neurosurgeon with a specific focus on delivering high-quality, patient-centered care with an emphasis on spine surgery outcomes, efficiency, and innovation. I recently turned to a new role down in Richmond, Virginia at Neurosurgical Associates.
That's awesome. When you think about spine innovations, what excites you the most right now?
Sure, there are a few areas that I think are really up and coming in the field, maybe even already here. One of them is motion preservation biologics. It's a huge part of my practice trying to expand the indications and the utility of disc replacement surgery. It's an old adage in this field that it only takes 10 patients to have a spine practice because patients keep coming back to the next level. And we have good data to suggest that disc replacement arthroplasty patients in the cervical and lumbar spine can hopefully avoid those very things from happening. I think the utility of minimum invasive endoscopic surgery is not just a marketing fad. I think that it's actually improving patient outcomes, particularly in the short term, immediate post-operative recoveries.
And when you think about just patient outcomes, what would you say is the most important metric that all spine surgeons should be monitoring?
So I think, you know, oftentimes the metric that maybe can't even be measured is just having a conversation with the patient. How are you doing? Are you back to your life again? the way you want to be living it. And that's a really hard metric to measure. But I actually think that, you know, from a standpoint of, you know, how quickly can we get the patient back into physical therapy after their surgery? How quickly can we get them back to their normal lifestyle? And my goal after every surgery is that it's happening within six weeks to three months after surgery. That's always my goal.
So the best quality of life improvement you can have in that three to six week window, it sounds like.
Correct.
Awesome. And can you talk about some of the biggest headwinds that you're anticipating this year and how you're planning to get ahead of it?
Yeah. So I, you know, health, there are extraordinary forces in healthcare that are changing the landscape and something that's fine surgeons in particular have to be able to adapt and, you know, dodge and block and, and, and evolve and adapt. One of them is, you know, reimbursement pressures versus rising costs. You know, how does that, how does that manifest in a private practice situation, the administrative burden and prior authorization with insurance companies, that's always, an ever-changing obstacle, particularly in the setting of AI being more and more utilized by the insurance companies. And also, where are we operating? Is it the ASC or the hospital? The biggest challenge today isn't really surgery.
It's the environment around the surgery. Getting ahead means really building efficient systems, proving our value, not only as a surgeon, but also as the actual surgeries with outcomes, data, and protecting sustainability of our workforce.
Yeah.
What innovations in spine surgery excite Dr. Kemp the most?
Can you dive into a bit more and talk about, you know, proving the value of your work? How has that process changed for you over the last five, 10 years?
So I think, you know, ever since I've, I think just generally in medicine, physicians are becoming less and less relied upon. You know, we have the increasing utilization of advanced practice professionals with nurse practitioners and physician associates. The question is, you know, what happens to the training of a surgeon, of a spine surgeon? And I think that is invaluable.
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