Chris Denney
The healthcare industry isn’t short on innovation, but behind the scenes, many organizations are dealing with growing operational complexity that can make it harder to deliver care efficiently. We sat down with our Vice President of Strategic Planning, Chris Denney, to talk about where the industry is feeling the most pressure today, and how a more thoughtful, data-driven approach can help close the gap.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you see in the healthcare industry today?
One of the most significant challenges is the widening gap between clinical excellence and operational complexity.
Orthopedic surgeons — and physicians, more broadly — are highly trained to deliver exceptional patient care. But today’s healthcare environment requires them to also navigate a growing list of operational demands, including:
- Payer negotiations
- Regulatory requirements
- Staffing shortages
- Technology infrastructure
- Access and clinic positioning strategy
- Ancillary investments
- Increasingly complex data reporting
The reality is that most physicians didn’t enter medicine to manage these layers of complexity. Yet they’re increasingly expected to do just that to deliver excellent experiences and results, often without the right systems or support in place.
Q: How is your work helping solve these challenges?
The solution starts with building the right infrastructure around physicians so they can focus on what matters most: patient care.
At Sequel Ortho, our focus is on creating an operational backbone that simplifies complexity rather than adding to it. A key part of that is Sequel IQ, our proprietary analytics platform designed to give physicians real-time visibility into how their practices perform.
Sequel IQ pulls together data from across the entire musculoskeletal care continuum — including clinics, surgery centers, imaging and therapy — and translates it into actionable insights.
With that level of visibility, physicians can quickly understand:
- Access and scheduling trends
- Surgical volumes and block utilization
- Patient throughput
- Revenue and cost performance
- Outcomes and recovery patterns
Instead of relying on fragmented reports or delayed data, surgeons have near real-time insights at their fingertips, allowing them to make faster, more informed decisions.
We’ve also built a comprehensive set of integration and operating playbooks designed to ensure the right services are delivered in the right locations, at the right time. These playbooks translate strategy into action, providing a consistent, repeatable framework that guides service line deployment, market planning and operational execution across every partnership.
They’re built from firsthand operating experience and are continually refined to guide decisions about what services belong in which markets — and how those services should be delivered to perform at scale.
By pairing data-driven insight with proven, systematic processes, Sequel Ortho helps physician-led organizations scale intentionally while solving real challenges and delivering high-quality musculoskeletal care tailored to the needs of each community.
Q: Where is the biggest gap in the industry right now?
One of the biggest gaps today is visibility into how orthopedic practices are actually performing across the full care continuum.
Many practices still rely on fragmented reporting systems that make it difficult to connect the dots between clinic operations, surgical performance, rehabilitation and patient outcomes.
This lack of integration creates blind spots that impact everything from efficiency to patient experience. Without a unified view, it becomes much harder to identify opportunities for improvement or to benchmark performance effectively.
Q: How is Sequel Ortho working to close that gap?
Closing the gap requires connected, actionable data.
Through Sequel IQ, Sequel Ortho aggregates information from across partner practices and care sites, providing physicians with benchmarking insights that show how they compare to peers across the network.
This level of transparency enables better decision-making at every level, from daily scheduling to long-term strategic planning.
Many independent practices also face complications from joint venture partnerships in surgical or ancillary facilities they don’t fully control. This can:
- Reduce oversight of patient and physician care continuity
- Make scheduling more complex for surgeons
- Divert revenue to external partners, who may reinvest it elsewhere
To address this, Sequel Ortho is focused on building a model that prioritizes physician leadership, transparency and operational alignment across the entire care journey.
Rather than relying on ad-hoc decision-making, Sequel Ortho uses standardized yet adaptable processes to align clinical, operational, and market strategies. This systematic approach allows partners to move faster with confidence, reduce variability and make sure that growth supports — not strains — the care experience.
Q: What does the future of orthopedics (and healthcare) look like?
The future is physician-driven and supported by efficient operations.
That means creating systems that allow physicians to move quickly, make informed decisions and deliver better patient outcomes without being weighed down by administrative red tape for its own sake.
It also means continued investment in:
- Expanding access points
- Investing in ancillary facilities and new service lines
- Optimizing the surgeon’s day
- Increase surgery center throughput and efficiency
- Improving the overall patient experience
While data and analytics are absolutely critical, execution is what ultimately drives results. We prioritize the strategies and playbooks that operationalize insight into thoughtful, intentional action, for a system that balances local autonomy with enterprise consistency.
Final Thoughts
Our industry is filled with experts on the cutting edge of their specialties. The problem is that our industry also often lacks alignment between that clinical excellence and operational execution.
As organizations continue to evolve, those that succeed will be the ones that remove friction, increase visibility and empower physicians with the tools they need to lead both clinically and operationally.