Regenexx Network Conference 2020

The Regenexx national conference was yesterday. What’s that? We now have about 70 sites around the US and a number of international sites and all of those physicians come together. Let’s dig in.

What is the Regenexx National Conference?

Once a year we bring together our network physicians and their staff to make sure everyone is on the same page. Above you see the number of people in the room! So what do we all do? Here’s the list:

• Review new lab and clinical research data
• Go over admin things that are happening in the network
• Get on the same page with the requirements of the corporate program

The Big Fun (If You’re a Doctor)

What the physicians like most is the second half of the day which is clinical. What they really love about that part are the case presentations. This is where our doctors present difficult cases to each other and the unique ways they’ve solved those problems. Or to ask everyone’s opinion about what comes next. We present both superstar successes and failures. Below are a handful of the formal cases presented by our doctors this year:

We then open it to all doctors to just discuss how they approach problems, ask questions, and discuss how best to approach difficult patients.

Our Network Doctors are Special

I can’t tell you enough how special our doctors are in the world of regenerative medicine. They’re the top 1% of physicians offering interventional orthobiologics because we screen them heavily before they’re allowed to walk through the door. We then require those physicians to take hundreds of hours of courses. Then we do things like this annual conference, to make sure everyone is on the same page.

What do you get out there in the stem cell wild west if you’re not being seen by a Regenexx provider? About 1-2 in 100 places will have similar physicians, but even then, what they do and how they do it is all over the map, Meaning no two doctors are doing the same things in the same way. Hence what you get in LA will be different than what you get in Florida.

The other 98 doctors or providers out of a 100 you can see will be far worse. They will be poorly trained and won’t know which end is up. They won’t come close to operating at the level we operate. That’s the “stem cell wild west”.

The Starbucks Experience

When I think about which company around the world that has done the best job of making sure you always get the same experience when you walk through the door, only Starbucks comes immediately to mind. While delivering medicine and coffee are vastly different, the goal of the Regenexx network has always been to standardize the care in a wild west medical space with ZERO standardization.

One of the real challenges in regen med is even if you had every doctor using the exact same orthobiologic product (which is not happening as that’s all over the map), you would still have the method used to deliver it vary wildly from clinic to clinic. Meaning given that there are no “best practices”, the end product that the patient receives is hugely different at every clinic.

If you think about employers wanting to pay for this stuff, one of the big barriers to entry is that what they’re paying for is all over the map. For instance, let’s take a PRP injection of the knee. Some clinics use high dose and some mid-dose, and some low dose. There are almost 20 different kits or machines used, all producing a different PRP product. Then you have red leukocyte rich PRP versus amber leukocyte poor PRP. Some doctors use anesthetics or add-ins like corticosteroids that we know kill cartilage cells (bupivacaine). Others don’t. Some inject the joint blind without imaging guidance, while others use ultrasound or fluoroscopy to make sure they’re in the joint. Some also inject tendons or ligaments around the joint. Some of those doctors use different criteria for when they add those structures. So almost no two PRP injections of the knee are the same.

Now let’s take the Regenexx network and why we have annual conferences like this one. We all use the same processing system and injection protocols. We all get the same training on what to inject and how. We all use imaging guidance. In addition, we all meet annually to make sure we’re on the same page. Hence, a PRP knee injection at site A is highly likely to be very similar to one at site B. That’s why we’ve had such great success with contracting with self-funded plans to cover what we do.

Now having said the above, we’re all still doctors, so we all have the freedom to address the needs of the unique patient in front of us. If anyone wants to innovate, that’s why we have a registry tracking all of these patients. We can look at that data to see if that innovation is performing any better than the usual way of doing things.

The upshot? Our annual network conference is something I look forward to because getting everyone on the same page is critical in running a network where we want every patient to get a high-quality experience. Finally, like most doctors, I also love our case presentations and discussions, as that’s how we physicians learn how to better serve our patients!

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile