The University of Vermont Health Network has acquired an orthopedic surgery practice in South Burlington.
The state’s largest hospital system acquired Associates in Orthopaedic Surgery on San Remo Drive on April 1. The process took three years, according to Mike Noble, a spokesperson for the UVM Health Network.
The practice has four doctors who are board-certified in orthopedic surgery: Douglas Campbell, Seth Frenzen, John Lawlis and Andrew Kaplan. The doctors offer various types of joint surgery, sports medicine, X-rays and MRIs.
The doctors will now be part of UVM’s Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation. Patients will now have access to UVM Health Network’s financial assistance program, Noble said, and the doctors will have the clinical support of the network.
Noble said the doctors approached the UVM Health Network on their own. He said they were having trouble replacing a surgeon who left, upgrading equipment, paying for the high cost of information technology, and generally managing a practice in the current health care environment.
“As surgeons, we will now not need to individually keep up with the increasing complexity of information technology and we will not need to try to run a business with the rapidly changing insurance models of reimbursement,” Lawlis said in a statement.
“Instead of spending our time running the business we can now spend our time staying state of the art in orthopedics and do what we do best — take care of patients at our present location and with our personalized culture of our patient care,” he said.
The UVM Health Network includes four hospitals — among them the UVM Medical Center and Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin — that chose to come together under the same governance umbrella, according to Noble.
