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Welcome to The Pivot Point, a student-led podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant city of Las Vegas while exploring the transformative journeys of students, professors, and executives. My name is Bardia Eivazi, an MBA student at UNLV. Join me as I delve into the stories of those who have embraced change, overcome obstacles, and made significant strides in their academic and professional lives. We're more than just a podcast - we are a community dedicated to empowering student voices and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Tweet us @pivotpointunlv!
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the
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views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
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Welcome to the Pivot Point, where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host, Bardia. Let's get the ball rolling. Hello everybody and welcome. Thank you all for tuning in. You may be wondering who I am. So today we have a special collaboration between Dr. Corvetti's Orthopedics Podcast and my podcast, The Pivot Point. My name is Bhargia Iwazi. I'm an MBA student at UNLV. Primarily, today we'll be talking about business, but I do have experience in biomedical sciences, so I'm more than happy to talk about medicine today as well. But without further ado, thank you, Dr. Corvetti, for being here with me today.
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You're welcome. It's nice to have another podcaster in the room, right on the show today.
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Yes, sir.
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So I'm happy to be your guest and thanks so much for sharing.
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Thank you for having me. So let's start off for any new listeners, just very briefly, what's your career story? How did you come to Las Vegas?
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That's a good story. So I'm a kid from Jersey, married a girl from Texas. That doesn't normally happen. drag that gal to Jersey for medical school and for residency, and we ended in Ohio. So I wasn't the most popular person from a weather standpoint. So when it came time to graduate residency and get my butt a job, she said, we're going to Vegas. And I said, well, I'd never actually been to Vegas. Nice. Not even on vacation. So we came out, we met some great doctors out here, some new techniques in surgery that I thought were just going to be groundbreaking and were really going to set me apart from some of the other docs. One of the trainers, Dr. Todd Swanson here in town, really kind of set me on the road to being different surgically and being maybe a little more innovative, a little more advanced. And I chose to work with him for a year. That's called a fellowship. And that year really taught me a lot about medicine. And it's so great that we're talking business today as well, because Dr. Swanson was a great mentor. Not only was he a great surgeon, one of the best I've ever seen after traveling the country with many different surgeons, but also the business side. He was president of the group. He really was always dialed into what was new, what was good for the group from a business standpoint, something you as a physician don't really get an opportunity to be part of. Unfortunately, I decided to go on my own instead of joining his group, which at that time was 20 different surgeons. But you felt he was a good mentor for you. Fantastic. This is where the hard knocks came in. I went out and put out my own shingle, you know, 24 years ago. And if you can imagine back then, this little dirty guy with a, you know, big deep voice or whatever, you know, going out and starting that fight and all the lessons I've learned over the years. And as you know, the Crivetti Orthopedics and Sports Medicine is my baby. I have two different surgery centers, overnight stay suites, which we pioneered in 2009 and 10. We've got two big facilities. We've just done so many cool things, and I learned a lot along the way.
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It's incredible. Did you have this vision from the start, or did it slowly evolve into what it is now?
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You know, I've got a little entrepreneurial spirit, and I think when I started out, I started out doing a lot of things. And the surgery center, when my wife said, we stopped doing these other things, was the start of focusing on medicine and business of medicine and really making it work because you can imagine the challenges in that field. And then the vision definitely grew to this. I hope to have another center, have my second center, hope to have a third center. As soon as I recover from the reeling of the second center, we will talk about that a little bit.
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That's so funny.
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I want to touch a little bit on the messaging. You have some of the most powerful marking I've seen of any medical office. Some of the phrases, I want to know who made these, these are really great. Recover like a rock star, getting you back in your game, and I can again, which I think is my favorite. What does that mean to you? I can again.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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So, messaging. So, we chose to go a different route when it came to reaching our patients. I think the traditional route was to meet primary care physicians, encourage the referrals, service those referrals and build your practice. And I think there's definitely a part of that hustling your butt off in the emergency rooms, probably the other side, and getting those referrals. We decided to take a direct-to-consumer, DTC, approach. We learned how to—I met my wife as a pharmaceutical rep back in the 80s. In early 1990, the direct-to-consumer world in pharma became huge. It was right when it first started in 89, and then in 90, spent over $2 billion in direct-to-consumer marketing. And the reason they did that is because they're smart and effective and it works. So we took that same approach. So what we were looking for were things that, how would we message our patients and just let them know it's going to be all right. You're going to be different. You're going to do what you didn't do before. So I can again, which we came up with at one time. I think we had a beer or two and that was one of our brainstorming and some potato skins and fries. And we decided, come on, let's do this. And we came up with iCanAgain. We jumped on GoDaddy and we're like, hey, is iCanAgain.com available? And it was. And it was literally the start of 15 years of encouraging folks to get back to the things that they love. So also known as getting back in your day.
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Wow, that's incredible. Greatest ideas come from a beer. I'm just having it.
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It's going out.
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And brainstorming with great people.
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Yes, sir. Sitting around a table with people, creative ideas like our marketing folks, and we're all friends and work hard together to come up with new messages. You know, marketing gets very stale. When you do something for 24 years, we talked about our marketing in the beginning. Don't ever let this get stale. Let's keep doing something new. Let's try a new program. You know, we've done commercials.
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We've done radio. We've done ads.
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Billboards as well.
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Yes.
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Right? Try and take a billboard down, and you should see the phone calls we got. We thought, they thought I died.
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Oh my God.
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Nobody died. We just decided we were going to move on and do something a little different. So we had to put it back up
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And I see it every day
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I know it works
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Anyway, so another thing that you touched on on your website was creating an out-of-hospital experience in a state-of-the-art surgical facility Which is some of the rooms that you just mentioned What were your biggest challenges in creating this facility? I know you have one in Henderson and now this office here in Summerlin
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So we don't have time for that, but I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes version. Sure. All right. The Cliff Notes version is, we didn't try, we did. We took patients out of the hospitals, okay, that were having joint replacement surgery, and we put them in a surgery center, and we changed their experience to a five-star overnight experience where they don't have an IV, they don't have a gown, they're in their clothes, they're with their families, and they're staying overnight with our concierge nurses and staff. So, what we realized is that people that have hip and knee replacement are not sick. They didn't need the hospital environment unless, of course, they have certain illnesses that we needed to be a little more careful about. So, the biggest challenges was regulatory and probably all the things I'm not really great at. For instance, I do things for the right reason, right? So, we had to go with a lot of forgiveness, not a lot of permission, because I didn't know the questions to ask. I didn't know that I had to go to this regulatory body and say, is it okay if I take sick care of somebody in my office? And then, of course, the inspection started. I'll tell you one of the best stories, and this will exemplify it. We were going to open in December of 2010, and the governing body at the Board of Health came and shut us down on a Friday before the Monday that my first six surgeries were going to be. And there's a guy that works there, and he's just a wonderful guy, came out and I said, look, come out and just see what we do, because they accused us of not doing what we said we were going to do in our license application. came out and the fella that came out and shut us down became my patient. The head of the department who shut us down ended up testifying to the Board of Health for my final license. So the point is, you know, stick to something great, put your heart by it, do it for the right reason and sure enough, all the money and the licensure took care of itself. So that's the short answer to a number of challenges it took to do something new.
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And some of your patients have gotten the chance to even come on your podcast. What was it like for them? I imagine it just strengthens your relationship so much and they just, it's another level of care, I think. What was it like for them?
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Yeah, and I think if you'd ask them how quickly we become friends. You know, when you change somebody's life like that, it's just a, and you know, a guy, Tony Birdy, right, played ball for the Chargers. Big guy, just a fantastic human, heinous life. But through this experience, became friends and became, you know, kind of family to us. And they are today and really changed his life in getting him back to just something simple like snowboarding, let alone playing ball with his kids for as big as he is and being able to travel and do things. So the relationship you develop with your patients is so important to me. So having them on the podcast was such a treat, right? Because they get to share that. And that's like, that's unpracticed.
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I haven't seen any doctors in my experience to have a podcast and then bring their patient test.
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So. Yeah, I wonder why we did. No, it's kidding. Again, reaching out to patients, because who do you go to your knee hurts and you go to a surgeon and you have a surgery? What's that? I want you to tell everybody about that So the podcast was cool because it gave us a chance for Tony to tell other people
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Yes
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Then are young like him with a bad knee or hip Get your butt fixed get back to doing the things you enjoy and a little bit about their doctors
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So they get to learn a little bit about these new doctors that have been to office now before they even come to see them.
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They do. And you know, when you hire doctors and you're bringing younger folks on to mentor and be part of, you do want them to have the same heart you have. They may not have the same knowledge, they may not be business folks, but you know, you got to see their hearts. And you interview a number of people and you find out the people that really reconnect with you and you connect with them and their lives and their families and their husbands and wives and kids. And those are the folks you want to work with every day. And that's the docs we have here.
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Absolutely.
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So what's an important piece of advice that you would give to a brand new doctor fresh out of med school wanting to start his practice here? You mean take crazy person medicine?
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Exactly.
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No, I think I have two surgeon daughters. So when you think about starting out, it's a real thing for me. One's an ear, nose, and throat doctor, one's ortho. And I'll tell you, when you're starting out, find somebody to show you the ropes. Now, get somewhere where people are like you and feel the way you do about patients. One of the things in medicine that really bugs me is that we've lost a little bit of the love of it. We've lost the reason why we're doing it. We've lost the care piece of it and how important it is.
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The bedside manners.
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Right. But see, that's what keeps you going. These I Can Again experiences for me is why I come here. This is 25 years. I'm not going anywhere for another 10 or 15 or 20 if God will let me be here. But it's those rewards. Put yourself in a place where you're comfortable, where you're going to get to do that. And I promise you, I promise you that the money and the business and the opportunities will take care of themselves. Just care about caring first.
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Do you think that medical schools should sort of reframe their curriculum in a certain way, teach more business classes or teach more of these skills?
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Yeah, I think if my daughters had their choice, I think Dad would be doing a podcast for the university every week to talk about things like negotiating a lease, how to negotiate your contract, where do you find an accountant, where do you find an attorney, all these things. How about capital? Where do you get the money? You want to put, you want to build a tenant improvement and put chairs in your office and walls and equipment. Where do you get the money to do that? And how do you negotiate that? So, I think it's super important. And maybe there's more of these conferences that the medical school on a Friday afternoon, you bring somebody like myself in, and we start to have these question and answer sessions, and it blows up, because I've done it. It blows up into, how the heck did you do that? And sometimes I'll know the answer, and sometimes I'll have to get back to you.
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Yeah.
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How has it been like to see over the decades the healthcare industry grow in Las Vegas? Where do you think this is going?
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Yeah, great question. I don't know if I have a great answer, but you can't get away from the fact that we're growing. I came here, 700,000 people. There's 3 million now.
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Wow.
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Right, think about it. So yeah, patient populations, incredible, I had one office in Henderson that service 250, now services 450,000 people. This office services over a million people in the Valley. So these numbers are getting... So I think it's growing. I think we got to keep a real close eye on the quality. We're Vegas. If nobody goes here for medicine, they go here to party. Well, our patients are coming from all over the country now, whether it be Canada, whether it be Alaska, I got a pipeline, no joke intended there, no pun intended, but I got a pipeline of folks no pun intended, but I got a pipeline of folks and I've got Iowa.
Transcribed with Cockatoo