Scaling Specialty Growth

Most specialty groups ask marketing for more volume. At New Jersey Brain and Spine, the goal is getting the right patient to the right subspecialist, and filling each surgeon's schedule with the cases they want to see more of. ㅤ Host Joe Zboch sits down with Amanda Haro , Chief Marketing Officer at New Jersey Brain and Spine, a 19-physician neurosurgical group in northern New Jersey. Amanda start...

Most specialty practices can tell you how their growth shows up in the numbers. Fewer can tell you what holds the organization together while it grows. ㅤ Joe Zboch sits down with Sandy Fragale , CEO of Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Specialists (OSMS). OSMS is an independent practice serving Northeast Wisconsin with nine locations. It has grown from five physicians to 40, and much of that growth...

A practice runs better campaigns, the form submissions climb, and the new patient numbers barely move. Daniel Goldberg has watched that happen enough times to know the problem usually sits behind the front desk, not in the ad account. He joins Joe Zboch on Scaling Specialty Growth to talk about what he asks before he spends a dollar at United Musculoskeletal Partners. ㅤ Daniel makes the case that...

Most growth advice assumes you can add providers. Holleigh Seales can't. Rheumatology Associates in Birmingham runs seven physicians and nine providers total, the physician owners settled on that number deliberately, and the building has limited space and limited people to run new operations. ㅤ So revenue has to come from inside the footprint. This episode walks through how that actually happens:...

Growth is not optional for an independent orthopedic group. Growth without the operations underneath it turns into a backlog nobody can work through. Joe Zboch talks with Alejandro Fernandez , CEO of Synergy Orthopedics, about why access is a strategy and operations problem first, with technology in service of that. ㅤ Alex runs the largest private orthopedic group in San Diego: over 50 providers...

Independent specialty practices keep hitting the same wall. Reimbursement is set by the government market, the cost side keeps climbing, and owner compensation flattens out underneath both. Joe Zboch talks with Larry Epstein , CEO of Pediatric Urology Associates, about what a practice CEO actually does when top-line growth runs out of room. Larry was brought in during a leadership changeover seven...

Growth is not the hard part. Holding the operation together while you grow is. On this episode, Joe Zboch talks with Cecily Sheats , executive director and administrator at Creekside Surgery Center in Anchorage, about why operational excellence is a prerequisite for growth rather than a reward for it. ㅤ Alaska makes the point unavoidable. The nearest referral centers are often Seattle or Portland...

Digitizing the front door usually gets framed as a tradeoff against the patient experience. Kaydi Siebeck runs patient access at Moreland OB-GYN Associates in Wisconsin, and she draws the line somewhere specific: the system takes the administrative tasks so her staff has more time for the phone call and the front desk conversation. ㅤ She joins Joe Zboch of Hatch to talk through nine years of chan...

Patients want the robot and the better brace. Reimbursement is moving the other way, and the practice sits in the middle of that distance every single day. Joe Zboch , Director of Marketing at Hatch , talks with Thomas Fondren , CEO of Advanced Orthopedics of Oklahoma, about what it takes to run aggressive growth goals and stay lean enough to support them. ㅤ Thomas walks through geographic divers...

Marketing is working, the phones are ringing, and then a new patient hits a completely different scheduling path than an established one. Joe Zboch talks with Jason Muchow , CEO of Advanced Bone & Joint, about what happens when you map that gap on purpose. ㅤ Jason is five months into the seat at a physician-led orthopedic practice that has been in the St. Louis metro for over 40 years. He wal...

Growth in a four-physician orthopedic practice doesn't look anything like growth in a health system, and the decisions that keep an independent group viable rarely show up in a strategy deck. This episode gets into what those decisions actually are: how a high-cost injectable came off the shelf when reimbursement stopped working, how it came back, and how a practice expanded patient access without...

Growth inside a private specialty practice usually gets split across departments. Marketing runs demand, operations owns the front desk and the contact center, online scheduling belongs to IT and Epic, and real estate decisions come out of finance. This episode is about what changes when a practice stops splitting it up and builds a growth department instead. ㅤ Joe Zboch talks with Blair Primis ,...

Growth in a specialty practice sounds like a good problem to have. Keeping the wheels on while you scale is the hard part. In Episode 15 of Scaling Specialty Growth, Joe Zboch talks with Jessie Brovold , COO of Orthopaedic Associates of Wisconsin, about what it takes to run a competitive orthopedic practice with a growth mindset without burning out the team. ㅤ Jessie walks through how OAW decides...

Specialty healthcare growth isn't optional, but scaling with operational excellence is the hard part. This episode gets into what that looks like when independent orthopedic practices come together under an MSO, and what has to stay local for it to hold. ㅤ Joe Zboch talks with Jarett Landman , former VP of Operations at Spire Orthopedic Partners, about balancing the operational needs of the busin...

Turnover, low engagement, and dropping productivity are the symptoms every practice leader can see. This episode is about the culture problem underneath them, and how to catch it before it becomes a fracture. Host Joe Zboch , Director of Marketing at Hatch , sits down with Olivia Wolf , a healthcare executive and consultant who has spent her career in orthopedic practice management. Olivia makes t...

This episode looks at a problem every mid-size specialty group knows: when you don't own the surgery center and don't have physical therapy under your roof, your growth depends on referral relationships you don't fully control. Joe Zboch , Director of Marketing at Hatch , sits down with Jeremy Fournier , Director of Operations at Advanced Orthopedics New England. Jeremy walks through how a clinica...

Switching electronic health record systems is one of the riskiest projects a growing specialty practice will take on, and the danger isn't always where teams expect it. On this episode of Scaling Specialty Growth, Joe Zboch sits down with Ken Takenaka , Director of Operations at Orthopedic + Fracture Specialists, a 32-provider physician-owned ortho practice in Portland, Oregon. Ken came up through...

Referrals are how an independent specialty practice grows, and right now most of that work still runs on spreadsheets, paper, and someone's memory. This episode looks at what happens when a practice gets serious about the referral process and treats it as a growth driver instead of a cost of doing business. Joe Zboch sits down with Misty Sullivan , care center administrator at Proliance Rainier Or...

Most specialty groups treat growth as the goal and figure the operations will catch up. This episode is about why that order is backwards. Host Joe Zboch of Hatch sits down with Michelle Winfield-Hanrahan , Chief Clinical Access Officer at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, to work through one idea she opens with and never lets go of: not all growth is good growth. They talk through...

This episode steps back from the guest chair. Joe Zboch , director of marketing at Hatch and host of Scaling Specialty Growth, recaps what five COOs and operations leaders at scaling practices taught him about the job. The throughline surprised him. ㅤ He expected operators to be mechanical and formula-driven. What he heard instead was that operations is about people and communication, and that th...

Roll-ups are common in specialty healthcare. Deep integration is not. On episode 7 of Scaling Specialty Growth, Joe Zboch sits down with Jenn Muina , Divisional VP for Florida at Gastro Health, to talk about what it actually takes to fold an acquired GI practice into a national specialty operation. Jenn ran M&A integration at Gastro Health before her current role, so she knows the work from th...

Patient experience used to be a fuzzy concept in specialty healthcare. It's not anymore. In Episode 6 of Scaling Specialty Growth, Joe Zboch talks with Matthew Slater , Administrative Director of Orthopaedic Surgery at UC San Diego Health, about what it actually takes to grow a specialty practice in a crowded market without letting the operational foundation crack. ㅤ They get into the connection...

Wake County adds 52 net new residents every single day. For a regional orthopedic practice, that's both a tailwind and a pressure test. More patients means more workflow to absorb, more payer rules to navigate, and less margin for operational error as the organization scales. ㅤ Joe Zboch sits down with Ross Rigdon , Chief Operations Officer at Raleigh Orthopaedic, to talk through what operational...

Operations teams in specialty healthcare know what growth feels like from the inside: more clinics, more providers, more volume, and a back-office that's always running behind. This episode looks at how a COO with a fresh-eyed perspective manages that pressure without letting the organization come apart. ㅤ Joe Zboch sits down with Amy Seehafer , COO of Orthopedic & Sports Medicine Specialists...

Running five clinic locations, 30 physicians, and 50+ PAs and therapists while opening a sixth site takes more than a good plan. It takes someone who knows exactly which dials to turn and when to leave them alone. ㅤ In this episode, Joe Zboch sits down with Kelli Anderson , COO at DMOS Orthopaedic Centers in Des Moines, Iowa, to talk about what operational growth actually looks like inside a larg...