Podcast Summary: Allison Roditi, Vice President of the Musculoskeletal Service Line at Catholic Health

Podcast: Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Host: Laura Dardo
Guest: Allison Roditi
Date: September 9, 2025

Episode Overview

In this episode, Laura Dardo sits down with Allison Roditi, Vice President of the Musculoskeletal Service Line at Catholic Health, to discuss the rapid growth and evolving strategy of musculoskeletal and orthopedic care at Catholic Health. They explore successes, challenges, provider collaboration, technology, patient access, program development, and what it will take to lead successfully in healthcare over the coming years.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Catholic Health Background & Recent Growth

• Introduction to Catholic Health
  • Catholic Health is a faith-based, six-hospital system on Long Island, NY.
  • 18,000 employees, 3,400 providers, multiple ambulatory sites, ASCs, imaging centers, home health, rehab, and hospice services.
  • Third largest employer on Long Island.
• Musculoskeletal Service Expansion
  • In under three years, the health system expanded to offer nearly every orthopedic subspecialty, including primary sports medicine, joint replacement, foot/ankle and hand surgery, pain management, spine.
  • Faculty numbers grew from about 10 to almost 40 (plus community partners).
• Pride in Local Access
  • “The fact that we can provide care for Long Islanders without them having to leave the island is something I’m really proud of.” (B, 02:50)
  • Recruited top fellowship-trained clinicians, including one from Oxford.

Top Challenges and Areas of Focus

1. Maintaining Care Quality Amid Reimbursement Pressures

• Challenge: Dwindling reimbursements, especially from government payers.
• Response: Focus on retaining patients within the system, improving connections between primary care providers (PCPs) and specialists.
• Education and Collaboration:
  • PCPs educated on subspecialist roles and patient referral processes.
  • Internal focus on growing "IN network utilization" by strengthening relationships among various specialties and across service lines.
  • “We’re making a huge initiative to grow our IN network utilization. … we’re seeing a lot more relationships being built across the subspecialties and even across service lines.” (B, 04:32)
• Cross-Department Partnerships:
  • Oncology ↔ orthopedics, neuroscience ↔ ortho for spine programs.

2. Enhancing Patient Access and Experience

• Goal: Seamless, accessible care “close to home.”
• Tactics:
  • Match patients to convenient locations and providers.
  • Ask patients about willingness to travel; connect them with alternative nearby locations as needed.
  • Build care pathways for continuity.

3. Combining Old-School Connection with Modern Tech

• Building Relationships:
  • Importance of face-to-face physician meet-and-greets, “old school handshaking.”
  • “You guys and gals should exchange cell phone numbers.” (B, 06:50)
• Technology Investments:
  • Leverage seamless systems (such as Epic) for care coordination.
  • Pilot projects with new technology and workflows before full rollouts.
• Communication is Key:
  • Foster real, personal provider-to-provider contact:
    • “…it is so much better when you actually know who the person is and you talked to them and you’ve had a connection and you can share patients and just share a conversation.” (B, 08:32)
  • Blend tech-enabled processes with relationship building.

Looking Ahead: Strategic Growth & System-Level Collaboration

• Centers of Excellence and Program Building
  • Focus on creating "hubs" for certain subspecialties, so any patient can get to the right provider at the right time.
• Leadership Alignment and Iterative Management
  • Align corporate, hospital, practice management, supply chain, and strategic planning through improved meeting structures.
  • Encourage leadership to take calculated risks, iterate quickly, and break down silos.
  • “Healthcare is very interesting. Things don’t always move as quickly as we’d like…” (B, 10:18)
• Forward-thinking, not reactionary:
  • Better alignment prevents mistakes and supports strategic, proactive planning.

Leadership Insights for the Next Five Years

• Critical Skills for Leaders

  • Communication: Bringing “the right people at the table to make decisions and be forward thinking.” (B, 12:26)
  • Human-centric care: Remembering that “at its core, we’re about serving people... these are human beings that need our care.” (B, 12:38)
  • Innovation and Flexibility: Leaders need to be creative, hands-on, and ready to adopt ideas from other, more nimble industries.
  • Experimentation: Embrace pilot projects—test on a small scale and scale up what works.
    • “Let’s not worry about large scale implementations as the first step. Let’s do it on a small scale, let’s see if it works and then let’s rule it out.” (B, 13:30)
  • Stakeholder Inclusion: Ensure finance, supply chain, strategy, and all relevant teams have a seat at the table to avoid missteps.

• Constant Learning and Adaptation:

  • “For me, I’m always learning and this is going to be a really exciting time about … what we challenge our assumptions and what we’ve known over the last 20 odd years of healthcare in order to take it into the future.” (B, 14:57)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Small but mighty, as we like to say. And it’s an absolutely phenomenal place to work.” (B, 00:52)
• “I think for us, even in some very challenging times over the last year, and what will surely be some interesting times ahead ... we’re managing to expand our footprint and grow, which I think is excellent.” (B, 02:35)
• “We’ve really focused on connecting our primary care providers with our specialists… providing access for patients that’s convenient...” (B, 04:14)
• “A little bit of technology, a little bit of people investment, and a lot of communication.” (B, 07:53)
• “No one is above doing any job… Some of us are going to have to get back to some of those hands-on things that maybe we haven’t done in a while…” (B, 13:08)
• “Too often … it’s very easy to kind of run with something and realize you’ve left out a major stakeholder and then… you’ve gotten very far down the path… and they come in and they’re like, ‘oh, we have to, you know, roll that back a little bit.’” (B, 13:51)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:39] Overview of Catholic Health, scope of services, recent growth in orthopedic subspecialties.
• [03:39] Key current challenges: financial pressures, strategies for quality and patient retention.
• [06:44] Technology, relationship-building, and pilots for improving provider collaboration and patient access.
• [09:20] Future growth: centers of excellence, system alignment, leadership approaches.
• [12:21] Leadership insights for coming years—innovation, communication, human-centered approach.

Takeaways

• Catholic Health has significantly expanded its musculoskeletal and orthopedic care offerings, recruiting top talent and ensuring comprehensive, local patient access.
• Addressing systemic financial pressures relies on strong internal and cross-departmental partnerships, seamless care coordination, and both traditional and innovative communication strategies.
• Future success depends on adaptable, communicative leadership, small-scale experimentation, stakeholder involvement, and keeping patient humanity at the center of all organizational initiatives.