On Nov. 1, Dr. Harvinder S. Sandhu became chairman of the department of orthopedics at Stamford Hospital after serving as co-chief emeritus of the spine service at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York.
The crossover from HSS to Stamford Hospital was not difficult for Sandhu, as the two organizations have been collaborating since 2017 in HSS Orthopedics with Stamford Health, which offers musculoskeletal care and services for joint replacement, spine and sports medicine.
In an interview with the Business Journals, Sandhu identified the priority of his job as the need to “improve access to our care for the communities, not only here in Stamford and Greenwich, but as we go further up north into Connecticut, Westport, Hartford and as far as Danbury.”
He added that “we can certainly develop a center of excellence that can attract people throughout southern Connecticut and even parts of upstate New York.”
Before joining HSS in 1997, Sandhu was chief of the spinal surgery service at UCLA. In addition, he has authored or co-authored well over 100 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and has received research awards from the North American Spine Society, the Orthopaedic Research Society and the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine, including the prestigious Volvo Award in Spinal Research.
His new job will be on the fifth floor of Stamford Hospital, which is dedicated to HSS Orthopedics with Stamford Health. There are six operating rooms and a rehabilitation gym at this site, which employs 50 staff members, including approximately 20 surgeons.
HSS Orthopedics with Stamford Health”™s approach to providing musculoskeletal care begins with a methodology steeped in analysis and protocol, which has been developed and iterated upon over years and years of review and refinement physicians”™ collaboration.
“The only way that you can continue to improve your methods,” Sandhu said, “is to monitor it, evaluate it and make those changes. We”™ve developed these protocols over the years that are not easy to do.”
This dedication to analysis and continual improvement to protocol has attracted the attention of surgeons from around the country and world, who travel to HSS to learn from its physicians and see their procedures in action.
“They take notes, they”™re very observant and they go back to their institutions and begin to adopt the same things,” Sandhu said. “We watch many of the other institutions begin to sort of copy or adopt the way we do things. It”™s our way of validating that our approach is the right approach.”
In his new chairmanship, Sandhu said that he will ensure patients were aware they have access to the same world-renowned care in Stamford Hospital as they do in New York City, and so will be spending more time with physician colleagues in primary care.
“Patients trust their primary care doctors for referrals, for advice,” Sandhu said. “The more they know about what we can provide, the more likely they are to say, ”˜Hey, you can have world-class care right here in Connecticut.”™”
Under Sandhu”™s tenure, the collaboration will continue its analytical approach, but with an eye for increasing the amount of data collection of patients, and in more efficient and objective ways. Wearable technology such as Fitbits would help facilitate this, according to Sandhu, as they allow for more objective information and analysis.
“In one of the clinical trials, we”™re actually giving (patients) a watch that they”™re going to wear for three months, so they don”™t even have to go out and buy one,” Sandhu said. “It”™s specifically designed by us and measures all the things we want to measure.”
Sandhu will also strive to continue HSS”™s reputation and role as a learning and teaching center, but now with an emphasis on robots and other technology.
“I would like Stamford Hospital to be a teaching center as well for a lot of this technology,” he said. “We have a large community of surgeons in the Northeast and it would be very easy for them to come down to Stamford, watch how we do it, we can teach them, we”™re happy to share some of our best practices with them.”
