New Year, Even Better CAO

To the CAO Team,

I hope each of you and your families had a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy New Year. I am pleased to share some of the most important activities and accomplishments that CAO a achieved in 2019. While there are too many to list them all, I want to highlight those that are important for you to know. Additional information and communication will come when we are closer to launching and progressing with some of these initiatives.

Probably the biggest single thing to happen last year was the vote to create our own Managed Services Organization (MSO). If you’ve never heard of an MSO, it is a separate business entity that makes it easier for healthcare organizations to monitor population health and clinical outcomes across its patient population. It also encompasses many of the corporate functions we have today and as we prepare to move further into the shifting landscape of healthcare. In short, it will help us work better together.

At the beginning of last year CAO became self-insured for its Health Insurance.  This allowed us to continue to provide excellent coverage for all physicians and employees while having a significantly smaller increase in policy premiums than the rest of the market.  This program has been a great success and we were happy to let everyone know at the end of the year that our rates for 2020 were going to remain essentially flat.

We have continued to build out our Central Office structure as necessary, hoping to solidify our ability to provide excellent service and support across the organization. We have hired a full-time Senior Director of Human Resources and a Controller. They have both been tremendous additions to the team and have begun the herculean task of reviewing what is in place and finding ways to create value and offer additional support. The Financial Team was further expanded with the addition of a Senior Accountant and a Revenue Analyst. Everyone at the Central Office is working diligently to get CAO where it needs to be in terms of Governance, Compliance and Operations.  

In 2019 CAO continued to standardize Physical Therapy operations, with most Divisions seeing significant improvements in their PT operations, as well as collections. We also established our own research foundation, a separate entity that is actively in the process of getting some initial research grants and programs up and running.  As the second largest private Orthopedic group in the country, we have a huge opportunity to do some meaningful research.

We also introduced events for specific audiences: our Physician Assistants and also for Physicians nearing retirement. Both of these gatherings were well received. We hope to have additional opportunities for our Physician Assistants, Physical Therapists and younger physicians to meet, mix and mingle in 2020.

In October we had another great annual meeting attended by many physicians and administrators. If you are in either of these groups and were unable to make it last year, I urge you to make the effort to attend this year’s meeting. Our annual meeting is the one time of the year we all get together to discuss CAO and its future directions.

After months of due diligence and vetting, the Board approved CAO moving to a single EMR platform. A preferred vendor has been identified, and contract negotiations are in process. Once an agreement has been reached you will receive information as far as transition, implementation and training. The vision is for the majority of CAO care centers to transition this year.

Onto the future and 2020 is going to be another busy year. In addition to buildout of many of the programs mentioned above, we are taking a look at ways to enhance and improve CAO’s IT infrastructure. As I’m sure you are all aware, cyber security is something we all need to be very cognizant of, and plan for as best we can.  We will be undergoing a top-to-bottom IT evaluation and risk assessment in order to understand where we are.  We will then develop a plan on how best to align our systems to provide maximum protection and efficiency.  Actually, some of the groundwork for this assessment has already started.

There are many more things that we have done, and are doing, to make CAO and our future MSO into the most powerful companies they can be.  I hope that you are as excited as we are for what the future holds.

Nicholas Grosso, MD

President, The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics