Interview with Dr. Marc Pietropaoli

Join Dr. Marc P. Pietropaoli, a renowned sports medicine and orthopedic surgeon, as he shares his expertise on innovative healing through personalized care and advanced orthopedic solutions in this podcast.
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Listen and broaden your knowledge as Dr. Pietropaoli offers non-surgical solutions and explains the benefits for the body.

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Transcript

Intro
Hey, I'm Dr. Ariana DeMers. I'm an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon, and I have successfully integrated orthobiologics into my busy practice so that I can provide a continuum of care and treat patients who are in the Gap. The Gap is this gray area in orthopedics where standard conservative treatments have not been effective, but surgery may not be warranted. And we usually tell our patients, come back when it's worse. What? These are your patients coming to you for help. Orthobiologics is that solution that can fill the gap and help you treat your patients who are in your office looking to you for help. Orthobiologics can also be an excellent treatment for frustrating problems without good surgical outcomes. This podcast will help you create the orthobiologics business that will make you love your job again. We will focus on the value of orthobiologics, patient selection, how to talk to your patients about money, office setup, and other logistics. If this is something you've always wanted but don't know where to start, join me in "The Business of Orthobiologics" podcast.
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Dr. Ariana
Hello. Welcome to "The Business of Orthobiologics" podcast. My goal is to inspire those surgeons out there who may be considering integrating orthobiologics into their busy sports medicine practice. I see this as the most effective way to get time back in your life while improving your patient care. If you're looking to add PRP to your practice and don't know where to start, you're in the right space. This show examines how one surgeon, Dr. Marc Pietropaoli, has achieved the holy grail of loving their practice and serving their patients. If you also want to make more money, less time, have happier patients, and enjoy your life, please join me with Dr. Marc Pietropaoli in The Business of Orthobiologics podcast. Mark, hi. Thank you so much for joining us. As we were talking earlier, that's a lot of vowels in your last name, so maybe just Dr. P. But if you can share just a very quick overview of what your specialty is, where you trained, how long you've been using orthobiologics in your practice, that would be great.
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Dr. Marc
Sure. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me on, Ariana. I love the bob. It's great. Good stuff. And I'm glad to know you in our Mastermind group. So, yeah, my name is Dr. Marc Pietropaoli. Dr. P is fine. People call me all kinds of things, but Dr. P is fine. That's probably the most common. I'm originally from Rochester, New York, and I did my college, medical school, and my residency in Syracuse, so I do bleed orange. And then I was fortunate enough to do a sports medicine fellowship with Dr. James Andrews and Dr. William Plancy down in Birmingham, Alabama, and great minds. Dr. Andrews just retired. He's obviously the goat of all sports medicine surgeons. Even though he was a very, very busy surgeon, he taught me how to take care of patients and how to actually really not operate on more people than operate on more people. Dr. Yocam once said, the late great Dr. Yocam, who was at Kerlan Jobe Clinic and took care of the Rams and the Dodgers and all those teams out in LA, he once said, Jimmy taught us more about when not to operate than when to operate. That also leads into my mindset of, yeah, I'm a surgeon, but not always necessarily want to operate. If we can get people better without operating on them. I mean, I've had five surgeries myself. Who wants surgery if you don't need it? If there are ways that you can get people better in a minimally invasive fashion, which was part of my fellowship there when I came back to Syracuse, I was the first surgeon to perform arthroscopic rotator cuff repair, and nobody did that. It was like, oh, that's crazy. It's not standard of care. You're crazy. Why would you do it that way? The literature doesn't support it. All the same stuff we hear about PRP and bone marrow and all these things, which isn't true, by the way, for PRP, as you know, there's a very high level one and two literature that supports it. But I've always liked being on the cutting edge of things, and it's exciting, and trying to offer the best treatments for my patients and get them better as minimally invasive, as fast as possible, and get them not only to relieve their pain, restore their function, but to optimize their function. That's our mission statement, the new wave in relieving pain, restoring and optimizing function for the world without limits, no limits. We're going to explore everything. Going back to when I first got involved with this type of treatment, I mean, even back in my fellowship, Dr. Andrews had worked with the greatest PT of all time, Kevin Wilk. Outstanding, although my PTs are very close behind him there. But Kevin, outstanding, and he was working with lasers back then already. And then I worked with a trainer called Tommy Craig, who had been with the Blue Jays, and he helped take care of a minor league team with me, and he had laser. I was like, oh, there's something to this. So I was intrigued by all these cutting-edge things. I'm a Star Trek fan, so I always thought it would be cool if we could diagnose somebody with something without having to cut into them and then repair them. I think someday laser and ultrasound waves and sound waves will probably be able to repair a meniscus someday without having to cut into somebody. But I digress. The point is, I've always been on the cutting edge, so I started doing PRP back in 2008. It's not the same PRP as we do now, as we know, but I did start doing the PRP back then. After I did my first one, I was like, I got to get an ultrasound machine because I'm not going to do this on a patient. Of course, it wasn't covered by insurance. If I'm going to do something for someone, I'm going to do it right to the best of my ability. We bought an ultrasound back then, and then I brought a laser in 2017. I started doing bone marrow aspirate back in 2017. Working with Dr. Andrews, physical therapy, athletic trainers, we've had PT in my practice rehab since probably 2006. We have a lot of strength and conditioning specialists in our practice as well. PT is limited to just working on that one joint most of the time, maybe a little above and below it. We work more on a whole total body fitness type of thing. We call that V-Fit. Then we've recently added genetic-based nutrition and fat and weight loss. We love doing everything we can possibly do to get people better without necessarily needing to do surgery. But if we have to do surgery, I do it in as minimally invasive fashion as I can.
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Dr. Ariana
Cool. You are in private practice?
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Dr. Marc
Yes.
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Dr. Ariana
Okay. Are you a solo practitioner?
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Dr. Marc
Yes. I'm at Victory Sports Medicine and Orthopedics up in Skaneateles, New York, which is southwest of Syracuse. I was in a group for the first couple of three years, and then I went out on my own, not necessarily because I wanted to. It's a long story, not probably for the podcast, but the point being that we get zero business training, as you know, in medical school and residency, zero, none. To go out on your own, only three or four years into your practice, and start a business up, I mean, it was scary, but I knew some other people who did it, and I'm like, If they can do it, I can do it, and you can do it. I did very, very well doing it because if you take really good care of patients everything else should take care of itself. But as time goes on, you realize the insurance companies make that hard. Even if you patient amazingly, they make it very hard to survive. Even though I did extremely well initially with just really treating patients well and getting great results, little by little over time, the insurance part of things started to really get to me.
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Dr. Ariana
Sure. That leads me to a couple of questions. Number one, what kind of business training have you had? You said you set up your practice when you first got out. Did you have any business training or you were just winging it?
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Dr. Marc
School of Hard Knock.
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Dr. Ariana
Okay.
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Dr. Marc
I mean, what I did was I partnered with a company out of Chicago called KarenZupko & Associates, and they still probably, I think, teach at TAOS a lot of times. A lot of coding. They're really good with coding and all that stuff. But also they have a part of practice consulting, helping set practices up, et cetera. And there are other groups who do that, too, nowadays, but they are probably the top for orthopedics. I partnered with them, and they got me a consultant and helped me really get everything set up. I tried to do as much. I had to stick with that group that I was with for a full year before I could leave. I switched my billing over to Med-in, which is the EMR that I have. And I was actually the first orthopedist in the area to have EHR back then. And so I was able to collect-- my patients have a list of patients already, and have a database of patients. Over that year, I had to stay there. I think that was huge. And my billing was able to hit the ground running because I was able to transfer that. So it was one smart thing I did. It might have been luck, but it was a good thing that I did because I wasn't starting from scratch once I left.
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Dr. Ariana
Got you. So when did you get serious about orthobiologics in cash practice? Maybe share a little bit about how much insurance you take and how much cash you take.
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Dr. Marc
Yeah, it definitely evolved over time. As I said, initially from 2001 to 2013, it was great. You just treat patients really, really well, and you get a lot more referrals, and you're going to do well. But as time went on and certain acts got passed by Congress, et cetera, et cetera, and insurance got worse and worse, you started to do math. That just comes down to math, and you look at what you're getting reimbursed for the amount of time you're spending, and it starts to-- you know it's a problem, but at the time, in 2013, 2014, 2015, I just felt helpless. There's nothing else you can do. Just keep trying to get more patients in the door and just see more patients and just pound them through and you have to spend less time with them, and it's not good. But then I knew of some of these other services. Like I said, in 2008, I knew biologics, it's the wave of the future. It's here now. It's only going to massively explode going forward. But I knew that that was something that was going to be-- and I wanted to be on that wave. So I started to do the PRP. Of course, we had trouble. No insurance would reimburse it, or they would say they would, and then you might get $25 or something. It wouldn't be worth trying to put it through the insurance. So you have no business training as to how much you should price that at, how you should figure out what your costs are, how much you should charge a patient, how you go about talking to a patient about, hey, this isn't covered by your insurance. You're going to have to pay out of pocket. So most of the I was dealing with back then either had already heard about it, read about it, or contacted me. I wasn't really doing any marketing or anything like that. But as time went on, I was like, these results are pretty cool. Then I'm like, what about cells? I mean, the cells are what do the work. I mean, the PRP only stimulates the cells and the growth factors. What about actually using cells? That's when, in 2017, I started doing bone marrow aspirate, bone marrow aspirate concentrate, and the results were even more impressive. I was just a novice at it, and I was clearly not charging how much based on the cost it costs, because it's expensive to do, as you know. I wasn't really all that savvy with it yet. Then I knew a rep who-- I was doing total knees back then, and I thought robotic would be the way to go. I got trained in robotic surgery, and then my hospital didn't want to do it. They didn't want to put the money into it. I never ended up-- they never did it until more recently. And this rep said, hey, I got this laser thing. And he brought it by, and I'm like, all right, well, leave the laser here, and I'll try it on my calf that I tore in the New York marathon like two years ago, and it keeps bothering me. And I mean, honestly, it healed it, which was amazing, because every time I tried to train for another marathon, I would reinjure it. So to me, that and working on my medial epicondylitis from doing pull-ups, I was like, wow, there's something to this as well. I researched into that. Then that's when I really started getting more into-- you can call it cash pay, non-insurance, self-pay, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, that stuff's not covered by insurance. But the company that I worked with, Cutting Edge Lasers, they gave you some training. Then there was another company that I worked with, Consulting Company, and they taught us more how to talk to patients about this, how to present it to them as an option, how to offer cash pay or self-pay services and scripts, and all those types of things. And so that's really where I learned how to offer patients things that weren't covered by insurance but had such a benefit. And if you explain it the right way to them, they're going to want to do it. I think that really got me into more of the self-pay stuff. And then, I mean, if you want me to keep going, I can keep going along my journey.
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Dr. Ariana
Yeah, absolutely. So percent-wise right now, how much cash-based services do you provide versus insurance-based services?
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Dr. Marc
I think last month it was 70s, 70% non-insurance, and the rest was insurance. It's probably 60, 40 at the least and 75, 25 at the most right now. Maybe even some months a little higher, some months a little bit less. So last month, I was pretty impressed by what it was last month as things that were not based through insurance. And what happened for me was I was offering all these things, but I was doing them a la carte. The only thing that I was really pushing was laser because no needles, no shots, and no side effects, is very, very safe, cleared by the FDA since 2009. It's almost a no-brainer. It doesn't hurt. It's non-invasive. So patients would pretty much go along with that. It wasn't super expensive. I was probably undercharging, by the way, for what my costs were, and I was at the time. But when Covid hit, I was still doing total knees at that time. I referenced total knees, so I was still doing them. What happened was the hospital shut down, so I couldn't do total knees. I always say something good comes out of something bad. I think telemedicine was one good thing that came out of Covid. For me, what came out of Covid that was good was this knee repair, not knee replacement. Basically, these people, they couldn't get a knee replacement, and they're like, is there anything we can do? Because we didn't know when things were going to open back up. It could be two years or three years. Who knew?
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Dr. Ariana
Right.
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Dr. Marc
I'm like, well, I have these things that I do. I do these bone marrow cells. I do this PRP. I have laser. I have this total body metabolic fitness. I have other things that we offer. I'm thinking about putting all these things together in a package or a program, and do you want to do it? It's not covered by insurance. They're like, well, I don't care. They were willing to pay because they had no other choice, and they'd been through everything else, and knee replacement wasn't available. Well, we started doing this, putting these together. Again, we were probably massively underpricing them because we didn't really know, had the training, and know how to check all our costs and all that stuff. But the point was people were getting really quite a bit better, and to the point where I even got a trademark that says knee repair, not knee replacement, because I knew there was-- I don't think that's made that much difference for me to get that, but it just proves how committed I am to knee repair, not knee replacement. What happened was, I actually was, I really want to get more into the biologics and all that. I started watching more webinars, joining the Biologics Association, going to more courses, and all that stuff. The more I got into it, the more I saw different people talking. Then I happened to come across Matt Gillogly, who you know, and he's more of the business part of things. I got his book, plug for Matt. I read it three times, and then I started working with him. That, I think, was the key to really understanding how to offer these amazing non-insurance programs to people, and you're afraid to talk to them about getting paid what you're worth. I mean, veterinary has no problem saying it's $10,000 for that ACL, right? But we're not used to that. We don't get any training. We're used to insurance. We're not salespeople. I mean, we want to just get people better. I think learning the business, that's when I really started learning a lot of the business about this.
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Dr. Ariana
Sure. So what do you think has been your most important business decision to date?
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Dr. Marc
Well, my most important business decision to date ever was leaving the practice that I was in back when I first started, by far.
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Dr. Ariana
Absolutely. Yeah. What are the main benefits that you've experienced since you've been aggressively integrating orthobiologics into your practice? If you were talking to your buddies from your fellowship and saying, hey, here's why orthobiologic integration is a no-brainer. You can do X, Y, and Z. What would you tell them?
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Dr. Marc
Well, the cool thing is most of those people that you talked about, the people from my fellowship, were pretty similar mindsets. You're sports medicine, you know, right? We want to get people better. First of all, we want to prevent injuries, right? I mean, you can prevent 50 to 75% of ACL tears. There's not enough emphasis on that. But preventing stuff is really important. But when we treat people, we want to treat them in a minimally invasive fashion as possible and get them back as quickly and safely as possible. And orthobiologics checks all those boxes, like amazingly. So number one, mindset-wise, that's what we want, all of us, right? That's easy. They get that. Okay? But the hesitation doesn't really work. We've had enough experience, you and I. It makes you excited. It makes your whole team so excited. Like, wow. This patient, all we did was take stuff from them. It's their body healing themselves. We're taking stuff from them. We're maybe concentrating it, and we're taking it and putting it exactly where it needs to go. We're using ultrasound, we're using fluoro, whatever, because we want to make sure we get it in the perfect spot. But they're healing themselves. We're just helping that, and it's so cool. Even with laser, their body is healing itself. The laser is just stimulating their mitochondria to produce more ATP and release nitric oxide and all those things that it does. It's just super exciting. You can see how I'm getting excited about it now. That's the thing. It really works, right? You know that. It's amazing. It actually really, really works. And so when you start seeing those results, it gets super exciting.
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Dr. Ariana
Do you feel like you've been re-energized about medicine and about your practice since you've gone all in with orthobiologics?
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Dr. Marc
1000%. I mean, it's not an easy process. Everybody's practices are different. For someone who's got an embedded insurance practice and you're trying to transition your team where at one point, you might have had four-- at one point, I was close to 50 staff members, you know.
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Dr. Ariana
Oh, my goodness.
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Dr. Marc
Right? And you are trying to transition into this type of practice here, and it's completely different. When you want to get busier in an insurance practice, when you want to make more money in an insurance practice, your overhead basically goes up pretty much equally with your revenue. You can only increase revenue by massively increasing your overhead. It's pretty parallel. You never make a ton of profit. With this, it's different. You have to get out of that mindset. In order to bring in revenue in the insurance, you have to increase your overhead, which means a ton of staff, and you don't need a ton of staff. When you're transitioning from an insurance practice where everybody was their mindset into what I'm doing now, there are challenges there. Now, if you're starting brand new on your own, I think there are challenges there, too, but that's pretty exciting, too. With the help of people like you and Matt, I'm more than willing to help, and there are a lot of us, as you know, who are willing to help, it's not daunting, and it's possible. It's possible for a big group to do, but I think the bigger the group, the more daunting it's going to be. But for someone who's in solo practice like I was, to make that decision was a lot easier. I absolutely am energized. I'm putting a lot of time and effort into it, but I know it's going to pay off. It already is, but there are a lot of other secondary issues that I have to get away from that had to do with that other practice that I'm still dealing with. But once those are all gone, then, yeah, I'm super energized. I had no hope before. I didn't know what I could do. It's just like, okay, we're getting a lot less. We're getting $1,500 for a surgery, and that covers an ACL reconstruction. Maybe if you're lucky, sometimes you get $900 or $700 or whatever, and that covers the pre-op visit. It might be with your PA or your nurse. It covers your billing. It covers your surgery schedule or getting it all set up. It covers you doing the surgery. Maybe you have an assistant. It covers 90 days afterwards. It covers your front office scheduling all those appointments. There's no way that $1,500 covers that. The only way you can do that is you can become a factory like some of these big groups. They build their own surgery center for total needs, and it's a factory, and they have very low margins, but that's how they make a profit by just pumping people through there. We know 25 to 30% of knee replacements are unnecessary. That's at the least where we can come in to help.
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Dr. Ariana
Yeah. What you're talking about is that volume solution to try to make it on volume instead of on quality. You're trying to make money on the volume solution. Patients see that and they don't really understand the why. I'm sure you've talked to your patients about why it is that you can't spend an hour with them if they're paying through their insurance. Now, if they want to pay cash and chat for an hour, I'm happy to talk with them for the entire hour because I'm getting paid what I'm worth to be able to keep my doors open and pay my staff and all those things. So that's a very different conversation. And you're like, well, honey, turns out if I see you for insurance, your insurance is going to be going to pay me $47 to see you. And they're like, What? Yep, I can't even pay my staff for the $47 that your insurance is going to pay me. I'm so sorry. She's like, well, you have to go. Yes, I do. But I hear you. So I'm going to ask you two questions. Number one, what do you think the biggest challenge has been in the last 5-10 years from a personal standpoint? What has been the most challenging part of this journey to be where you are now?
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Dr. Marc
I mean, the most challenging part has not been to make the decision to eventually try to go full non-insurance. I think the hardest thing, the most challenging thing has been executing it. And again, it doesn't necessarily have to do with the benefits of the orthobiologics or even the-- I have a very good understanding now of how to present this to patients and all those things. It's just getting free from the shackles of what a 25-- I've been in practice 25 years, maybe 23 years of full insurance, and getting extracted from that. It's very challenging. And keeping your staff motivated. They get excited about this as well, but there's a lot of work on their part, and I owe them a ton. And, you know, you always preach about how your staff is awesome and how they really do so much for you. I mean, that's challenging, but that's also leadership. It's challenging, but to me, the challenge is all these little things that are still popping up from the past insurance practice that I have to get rid of. And that will happen, but to me, that's been the biggest challenge. But motivating your staff is no matter what, you run a business, motivating people, leading people, that's a challenge. But I like it. I like that. I don't like the challenge of all the stuff we have to do to divest from an insurance practice that I've had for 25 years and full insurance for the most part of 22 or 23 years. That's the part.
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Dr. Ariana
If you were telling somebody, oh, man, you got to go cash, get out of insurance, what are the top three things you would say, you need to do these three things tomorrow.
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Dr. Marc
Well, I think we talked-- well, I'll kind of work backwards, and I might have you remind me of that question in a second, too, if I get off guard or off-topic. But one is definitely what I started to do was I gave plenty of examples to my staff. I sent a bunch of emails. I would send emails about this is what we got reimbursed for this. This is what we got reimbursed for that. It was eye-opening for them. Just like you mentioned to a patient, it's eye-opening. You're getting $47 for the visit. It was very eye-opening. And then they get upset. And you do need a common kind of goal to work toward-- or even a common, if you want to say, enemy for that matter. I hate to say it. I mean insurance companies are good for lots of things, but they're bad for a lot of things, too. But they have their own-- it's what they do. But they are the common enemy in some ways. And so you have to show what these insurance companies are doing and expecting of us, and it's not right. And so get them on board. That's one. Or little by little, try to get them on board. Go into your own books and figure out what your real costs are and what you're actually really bringing in. Then I think the third thing I would do is make sure you have a good list. If you've been in practice a while, even if you have a list of 3,000 patients, I mean, I had 30,000. Some people might have 10,000. Some people might have 50,000. Be very happy that you have a list and use that list. You'll mark it to your list to start with. I'm sure you've been through all this, but that is how you get started. You have a lot of people who know, like, and trust you, as Matt talks about all the time. If you're successful in your insurance practice, you'll be successful in this as well because those people already know, like, and trust you. Those are the first people that you're going to send emails to and try to get in and talk to about this. Not all of them are going to go for it, but a lot of them will spread the word as well for you. So if you have a list, I would start with that first. And that's fine. You can use the insurance insurance to still get the patients in the door, but use your list if you want to start talking to patients about this. I think that's probably-- if you're already in practice, that's the key, I think.
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Dr. Ariana
Great. What information do you wish that you had at the outset of this journey that would have maybe given you a shortcut?
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Dr. Marc
A lot of people like to say, what? This is the problem, that's the problem, this is the problem, et cetera. I always tell my staff, how not what. That's one thing. But probably more important thing that I learned is who not how. That's going to get you there a lot faster. Complaining about what, we need to do this, we need to do that, no. How are we going to do that? That's really important. But that still takes a lot of time, and you're always going to have to do some of that. But if you can find somebody like yourself or like Matt or like I said, myself or someone else who already has been there and done that, that is always going to give you a shortcut. That is the biggest shortcut is who not how, if I have to say.
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Dr. Ariana
Great. Yeah, that's so good. Meaning that you have to make sure that you have someone that's on your team, but leading you or at least providing examples or saying, no, you're doing right. And hey, have you thought about this or that? But also, I think that this goes a little bit further as to who's on your team because a really good team can get you through those rough patches where you're like, I don't know. This may not work. And then it turns out that it's fantastic. But I think if you are all alone trying to drive and do the ship and do all of the things, I think it's a little harder than if you have a nice team that's really everybody's on board and saying, yes, and I'm going to do this piece, and yes, I'm going to do that piece, and yes, I'm going to take this on and be the owner of this piece. I think that makes being a solo practitioner and an entrepreneur much more palatable, but also just sharing that load makes it easier to be able to do those things.
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Dr. Marc
You have to educate the team as to what you're trying to do and get them on board. The people who aren't on board, they have to go. Sometimes even people that are on board, you have to, sometimes, make tough choices there, too, even to people-- really, really good people. So that's really, really hard. But you're absolutely right. The team is the key. You can't do it on your own. So getting your team on board, having great people in great areas, which I'm very lucky I had that. You've met some of my team or know some of my team from some of the calls we have and everything. I mean, they're on those calls with Matt just about every time. So they're totally all-in, and they are willing to take up a lot of this. And you're 1000% right in what you just said.
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Dr. Ariana
Sure. And I think the one thing that you said that I think a lot of business owners get nervous about is that transparency, sharing all of the things about the business. And I have always been really transparent. But the one thing that I did that I think really increased my transparency or my ability to share is I actually drafted a nondisclosure agreement. So all of my employees have signed a nondisclosure agreement that they're not going to share all the goods that we talk about. And then that allows me to feel like I can talk about any darn thing that is going on in our business without worrying about who's going to know or where that information is going to be. And so we talk about pricing, we talk about the cost of business, we talk about staffing, we talk about salary, we talk about all of the things. It's an ongoing dialog in our company because we all have the same goal. If we can talk about everything very, very transparently, and I think that's one of the things you were alluding to, is like hey, guys, this is where we're getting paid. This is why. This is the why behind why we're moving forward with non-insurance-based care because we can't keep the doors open if we take insurance. This is a ship going down if we only take insurance. So when you see that, they're like, oh, gosh, well, we can't make a living wage by that, so neither can you. And so then that aligns everybody's goals and values in the same sphere, and it just supercharges that teamwork.
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Dr. Marc
1000%, yeah. It comes down to trust. I mean, our values, our core values, trust is number one. Then we have to take initiative. We have excellence, empathy, all-in is a big one, accountability, reliability, and resiliency, being able to handle things that constantly get thrown at you, surprises, things like that. But trust is number one. You got to have the trust, and that's huge.
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Dr. Ariana
Absolutely. What advice would you give a physician, a busy sports med physician that sees the writing on the wall and they're like, oh, man, I see the writing on the wall. I'm experiencing that decline in reimbursement. I'm working harder for less money. I think I want to add orthobiologic and cash practice. What advice would you give them? Maybe two things that are really to drive that impetus to say, just do it, or, hey, get your eggs in one basket or two baskets. What would you tell them?
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Dr. Marc
I would tell them to go to your course in "The Business of Orthobiologics". Just sign up and go and probably do that. Yeah.
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Dr. Ariana
Awesome.
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Dr. Marc
and I'm not saying that because you're egging me on to say that at all.
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Dr. Ariana
Oh, thank you.
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Dr. Marc
I'm saying that because A, I know what you're doing, and B, I'm all on board with that. But it's the who not how thing, right? I mean, you can do it. I would tell them, you can do it. You think you can, et cetera. You can do it. I was in your exact same shoes. Do you want to keep seeing 60 patients in a day and doing 10 more surgeries in a day and then look at what you're actually getting reimbursed for that. I think Don Buford, didn't he put something out that in a few years, orthopedic surgeons are going to be getting paid $11 an hour to do surgery, something like that? It's going to add up to that. It's terrible. People don't realize that. They just don't realize that. It is easy for the insurance company to just beat on us because we went into business medicine to help people. If you didn't go into medicine to help people, then you're probably not in it for the right reason. This is just a little backstory, but when I was interviewing for medical school, I was told don't tell them when they asked you why you're going to go into medicine that you want to help people. I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I still said I wanted to help people. I didn't care what they told me. I have a lot of PA students who come through, and I tell them, you should always be proud of that. That's why you went into it, right? But what didn't happen is no one taught us how to do business or how to do any of that other stuff.
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Dr. Ariana
Right.
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Dr. Marc
And so again, you can still help people even probably better than you thought you could, and you'll get more satisfaction. You'll spend more time with them. I mean, that's helping people. I spend an hour with people. No, there are not many orthopedic surgeons. There's no way that they spend an hour with patients. My average appointments are either a half hour or an hour. They're like, wow, you can't do that. You can't stay-- there are ways to do it. Right? Go to someplace who are-- talk to someone who already knows. I mean, I'm willing to talk to people, too. You can put my email down or my website or whatever. But go someplace where you can learn and I think give the info on your course and go to the course.
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Dr. Ariana
Cool. Well, so yeah, that brings me to that. How do people get in touch with you? Do you have some social media or is it email or on your website? What's the best way for people to check out what you're doing? Do you have a YouTube account? Are you doing that?
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Dr. Marc
We got about a million things.
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Dr. Ariana
Tell me all your goods.
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Dr. Marc
Well, first of all, I would say, if you want to get in touch with us, I think just info@victorysportsmedicine.com, that email, that would be good. You can obviously call 315-685-7544. You can call that as well. But I think the email works good. But also our websites, "victorysportsmedicine.com", also "victoryinmotion.com". There are a couple of websites. Then we have a YouTube channel, "Victory Sports Medicine". We have Instagram. I have my own personal Instagram, we also have a company Instagram. We have Facebook. We have-- so Victory Sports Medicine on anything, TikTok, LinkedIn, Dr. Marc Pietropaoli. So there are a lot of different ways to get in touch with us. But if you really wanted to just all hours of the night, get in touch with us at "info@victorysportsmedicine.com" is probably the best way because several people look at that email every day.
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Dr. Ariana
Awesome. Well, Marc, thank you so much for sharing your journey. And it's so inspiring to be able to know people like you. Also, so many people are looking at you going, oh, my gosh, that is me. I could totally do that. Stop banging my head against the wall, making $700 doing an ACL reconstruction. I just wanted to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule and away from your patients to come on and share that information with us. This has been "The Business of Orthobiologics". Thanks so much for joining us today. If you want to know more, please visit "prp-now.com". You can click and get a free Masterclass. Or more importantly, we're having a live event called The Business of Orthobiologics. It's in Dallas at the end of March, March 22nd and 23rd. Please call and come by. It's an amazing event, and it's going to be the business of not only how to establish a cash practice, but also how to market, how to talk to patients about cash and orthobiologics, the science behind orthobiologics, and how to really succeed. Also, please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast or check out my YouTube channel for more guidance on integrating orthobiologics in your busy practice today. So thanks again for joining us. I really appreciate everybody's time.
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Outro
This has been "The Business of Orthobiologics" podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to know more, please join us on the website "PRP-Now.com" and click on the FREE Masterclass. Also, don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to this podcast to get more guidance on integrating PRP in your busy practice. Bye for now.
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