Ravi Bashyal, MD, is vice chair of patient and provider experience and director of outpatient hip and knee replacement surgery at Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem and a clinical assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
Dr. Bashyal will serve on the panel "The Next Great Leap for Total Joints in ASCs" at Becker's 19th Annual Spine, Orthopedic & Pain Management-Driven ASC Conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from June 16-18.
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Question: What issues are you spending most of your time on today?
Dr. Ravi Bashyal: I would say, clinically, we continue to understand how to best care for our patients within a landscape where payers continue to have different hoops that they need us to jump through for patients to get the care that they need. So I'd say one of the biggest issues we're dealing with on the patient care side is understanding preauthorizations and how we can get our patients the care they need within the framework of a somewhat complex payer system. This system sometimes makes it difficult for us to deliver the care we need via prior authorizations or other restrictions on our ability to deliver that care. So that's probably one of the biggest issues we're dealing with there.
Q: What are your top challenges and how will they change over the next 12 months?
RB: I think our challenges can be viewed as opportunities. So to follow-up on the portion about payers and insurers, I think we need to continue to partner with payers to work on getting some transparency. We want our patients to get the care that they need. We understand that we live in an age where there are limited resources to distribute, so there has to be some regulation. But we really need to gain clarity and transparency on how this will work. We need to provide patients with the care that they need. So I think that in the next 12 months, it is ideal to gain some transparency and really be able to hold payers accountable for the decisions they are making for patient care.
Q: What are you most excited about right now?
RB: Within my minimally invasive hip and knee replacement field, there are a lot of new innovations, and I think it falls into several categories. One is technology. We are using technology like robotics, computer-assisted surgery, and patient-specific instrumentation to perfect how we're putting these implants into our patients. I think that we've seen a significant shift in the past 10 years from kind of an analog system where we used our G guides and our hands and our eyes to determine the position and placement of components to the ADA adoption of technology, where we're really able to dial things in extremely precisely. And I think as good as hip and knee replacements were before, and they were excellent operations and continue to be excellent operations, we should always have an open mind to improvement.