Spine Surgery Growth, Robotics, and Building Anti Fragile Systems with Dr. Shaleen Vira
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What is Dr. Shaleen Vira's role in spine surgery?
This is Carly Beam with the Becker's Spine and Orthopedics Podcast. And I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Shalan Veera, Chief of Orthopedic Spine Surgery at Banner University Medical Center. Dr. Veera, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
And so before we dive into questions, I'd love if you could just introduce yourself, share a bit more about your work.
Yeah, I'm a spine surgery surgeon at Banner University Medical Center. I've been here for about two and a half years. I help lead the ortho spine service line in the Phoenix Valley. It's a very rapidly growing part of the country, and we're seeing a lot of increase in volume and people with spinal pathology, both for degenerative conditions and deformity, as well as trauma and tumor, kind of a whole gamut of spine conditions we treat. So it's been a great environment.
Very exciting to hear about increased growth, increased volume. Can you talk about how you see your role with the spine department at Banner evolving, and what does growth look like to you in 2026?
Yeah, part of it is really supply to meet demand, quite simply. So as we grow at different sites of service, as Banner expands across the valley and across Arizona, really having people – meet that demand at different points. So we are growing as a service line. We're actively recruiting surgeons. We function very well with neurosurgery colleagues. And so the neurosurgery department has certainly grown in terms of their service line. And so coordinating with them has been a great joy. And so part of the growth for 2026 is going to be increasing our capacity to do surgery at different sites of service. And part of it is to continue to increase new technologies and incorporate new technologies at the different sites of service.
Yeah. So are you planning to, you know, absorb practices, build a new banner facilities? What does that look like?
Mostly more from a personnel standpoint, growing in terms of non-operative and operative spine providers. So I think Banner has a great platform in terms of having sites of services, whether it's hospitals, surgery centers, clinic locations, but really bringing the spine, like high-quality spine providers to those locations.
Yeah, so then you talk about your strategy for recruiting and then keeping spine surgeons and non-surgical spine specialists.
Yeah, so really growing a good collaborative environment, good jovial environment, looking for people with good camaraderie and people who work well in a large institutional setting. So really just hiring carefully and hiring people who've had great training. We have people in our faculty who train at all the best places around the country and who want to be in a very exciting part of the country, Phoenix and Scottsdale. in the surrounding areas is a great place for people to live, raise families, and stuff like that. So there's been no shortage of people who've been interested. And so we've been forming a team that includes people with different skill sets. So we have people who are really good at minimally invasive type of surgery.
We have different people who are really good at intradural surgery, spinal cord surgery. And then we have different people who are really traditional and deformity trained like myself. And so really, just as a football team or an NBA basketball team is formed, we try to recruit all-stars who touch the different areas of spine and then comprise and then come up with a great overall team with expertise in different fields. And that same thing goes to the non-operative side as well.
That's excellent. I love that analogy you're using here of an NBA team. And then, Dr. Veer, I wanted to ask you specifically some questions related to spine technology, especially with robots. Spine robots, they offer lots of promise when it comes to precision and consistency, but they're also really expensive. So how should health systems and practices weigh these types of purchase decisions?
Yeah, I think the very first question is, that either administrators and certain leaders have to ask themselves is that does these tools solve a problem that we truly have at the volume we have um one of the things i learned from my training at cleveland clinic was that whenever evaluating a new technology the first thing to ask is that is this solving a problem that that i had in my practice you know and that just that scales to not just the individual surgeon but the institution as well you know a lot of times
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