The Reno, Nevada-based Orthopaedic Implant Company (OIC) is celebrating 10 years of trimming the fat from implants while maintaining quality and patient outcomes.
Itai Nemovicher, OIC’s president and CEO, was working as a sales manager for one of the large, integrated orthopedic manufacturers a decade ago when he started thinking about the existing pricing structure for the products he was selling. In his view, the system did not serve patients well and contributed to an onerous burden on the healthcare system. Along with orthopedic trauma surgeon Peter Althausen, Nemovicher decided to create an alternative approach which would, if successful, reduce excessive and extraneous sales and marketing expenses.
How did Nemovicher redefine orthopedic pricing and delivery? “It started with a commitment to humanizing the OR process full circle” he explained to OTW. “To truly alter convention in orthopaedics meant confronting the reality that many financial decisions around a surgery were being made in the name of minutes and margins, not in the name of what was best for the patient. Our goal was to create a system that championed healing patients both clinically and financially.”
“The heavy, consistent reliance on industry in our ORs needed to change,” said Althausen to OTW. “Plain and simple. Our business focuses on streamlining the way our implant sets function in the OR, providing surgeons with familiar and intuitive tools that also serve to easily train staff so that they can eventually become completely self-sufficient with our implant systems. This mitigates industry dependence and drives down costs for patients.
And the march toward price transparency?
“Oftentimes, with conventional vendors, surgeons will have no idea how much a procedure for a certain ortho injury will actually cost ahead of time,” Nemovicher said to OTW. “We sought to change that. We introduced our One Procedure, One Price initiative to help hospitals and surgery centers combat those budgetary unknowns by being completely up front and consistent about our pricing for the most common ortho trauma procedures. This kind of practice is not yet widespread, despite the incredibly positive impact for healthcare providers and for their patients.”
Co-founder, Dr. Althausen, added, “The truth is that 80% of the implants used in ortho trauma surgeries are entirely commoditized. Prices for that 80% should theoretically be exactly the same from vendor to vendor, but they’re not because a hefty and highly variable portion of the price tag is dedicated to expensive sales and marketing efforts. Moving away from this business model will mean a shifting paradigm away from tradition. While it’s been incremental, change has to start somewhere. If that means it starts with us then so be it.”
