Planning, Building, and Maintaining a Successful Musculoskeletal Service Line

Within the past 3 decades, a recent trend in the growth of musculoskeletal service lines has been seen nationally. Orthopedics offers an appealing concourse for implementation of service-line care. Within this review, the authors address the components involved in planning and building a musculoskeletal service line. The authors also address methods by which orthopedic surgeons can maintain the efficacy of their service lines by examining how orthopedic surgeons can navigate their service line through recent advents in health care reform. Finally, the authors review successful examples of musculoskeletal service lines currently in practice within the orthopedic community.

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Comanagement and joint ventures serve as 2 management models that orthopedic surgeons may adopt to maintain autonomy in musculoskeletal service-line initiatives.

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Comanagement and joint ventures serve as 2 management models that orthopedic surgeons may adopt to maintain autonomy in musculoskeletal service-line initiatives.

Another management model that is highly amenable to musculoskeletal service lines is a joint-venture. This type of management arrangement aims to create distinct freestanding centers of care that offer specialty services to patients. These centers may include specialty surgery centers, diagnostic clinics, or immediate care facilities. Because of the large volume of minimally invasive orthopedic surgical techniques and acuteness of orthopedic trauma, joint venture arrangements offer formation of musculoskeletal enterprises that can appeal to both patients and providers. Much like comanagement, joint ventures should be advised to seek an outside independent legal entity to carefully structure a contract that is free of astringent liability. Currently, there are examples of successful musculoskeletal service lines that are in practice nationwide. Such service lines necessitate further exploration by the orthopedic community.

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