The jump from board president of Indianapolis-based OrthoIndy to CEO is a major transition for Matthew Lavery, MD, and his clinical work. Still, he said keeping up with patient-facing work will be important to being a strong C-suite leader.
Dr. Lavery spoke with Becker’s about his perspective and advice for other physician leaders.
Editor’s note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: How do you strike a balance between your clinical and administrative work?
Dr. Matthew Lavery: It’s a challenge. When I was functioning as practice president, I was doing approximately three-and-a-half days a week of clinical work and then about a day and a half of administrative work. Going to the CEO role is going to require more of a commitment to the administrative time. At most I’m sure I can do about half-time clinical. I end up working a lot late into the evening and early in the morning before I start seeing patients and a little bit on the weekends. But there’s also the aspect of maintaining some life balance there, too. I’ll reduce my clinical time again going from approximately three-and-a-half days clinical to around two-and-a-half days as CEO.
As a physician CEO, I think it’s important to continue to see the same challenges that my physician partners see on the front end of things, how we’re delivering care, how patients are accessing them and their challenges with our EMR and our billing systems. If you lose touch with those things, then some of the benefits of being a physician CEO start to disappear. So I do want to stay involved clinically. It’s just going to be at a reduced rate.
Q: What advice would you have for physicians who might want to take that leap and how to manage those expectations?
ML: No. 1 is to keep in mind why you’re doing it and what benefit you can drive as a physician. Where physicians really are strong is we’ve delivered healthcare from the front lines, and we’ve seen the challenges our patients have with accessing care or going through the system. How do you access the system? How do they flow through the clinic? How do they flow through the operative process?
I think it’s unique that physicians can do this. Because for most administrative CEOs who fill those roles, unless they’ve been a patient themselves, they just don’t understand the nuances of what it’s like to go through and access the system like that. I think that’s where we have immediate benefit. If your focus is on providing the best patient experience, then patients will naturally flock to your organization. I’ve had that frontline experience with my patients. I get the feedback from when they get a little frustrated with something. For instance, I’ll have people who come see me and say they tried to go to another practice but it would take weeks and you were easier to access. Or they’ll ask to improve areas as well. To me those are all unique things that physicians get all of that frontline feedback. Administrative-only CEOs just never have that experience with patients, and they miss out on some of those really detailed things that we have to sort of take the information and turn it into a better experience.
Q: What’s something that all spine and orthopedic practice leaders, whether or not they’re physicians, should do to thrive in 2026?
ML: It’s the three A’s of healthcare: able, available and affable. What that means to thrive in 2026 is how do you put yourself in the shoes of patients? Ask yourself questions about how they want to access healthcare in 2026 and what defines a good patient experience on the front end. Design your systems and operational efficiencies with that goal in mind of what’s the best experience. These are things like being able to schedule outside of normal business hours like we’re doing with our AI based scheduling system. I think those are things that you constantly have to be moving in those directions. But the question you should be asking yourself is what’s the experience the patient wants to have? And then ask how do we leverage current technology and current best practices to provide them with that?
