Carter Cassidy, MD, orthopedic spine surgeon and department chair, leads the UK HealthCare Orthopedics team
LEXINGTON Ryan Carter Cassidy, MD, says leading the UK HealthCare Orthopedics team is always about maintaining high standards. For him, the two key elements of providing the highest level of care center around craftsmanship and compassion. “Craftsmanship and being a professional and doing good work, maintaining your medical education, going to meetings, learning new things, that’s what I expect from my team,” he says. “And there’s also compassion. We’re here to help people, and we’re here to listen and to figure out what the problem is. Sometimes it’s hard stuff. We want to be able to do all of that, from the easy to the hard. We’re here to take care of Kentucky.”
Cassidy came to UK HealthCare more than 20 years ago. He went to college at Youngstown State University in Ohio for a combined bachelor of science and medical school program. There he attended an intensive year-round two years of undergraduate study, culminating in receiving his bachelor’s degree, followed by four years of medical school.
After graduating, Cassidy came to UK for his orthopedic surgery residency in 2000. Later, he completed an additional spine fellowship at UK. Since 2006, he has served as a member of the faculty at UK, providing orthopedic spine care. Currently, he sees patients at the UK HealthCare Good Samaritan Spine and Joint Clinic and is the Dyad partner and director for UK’s musculoskeletal strategy and intake team. He previously served as the director of the orthopedic surgery residency program.
Unlike some in the medical profession, Cassidy didn’t come from a family of doctors or healthcare professionals. “My mom was a teacher, so it was instilled in me early that you go to college and you learn,” he says. “Medicine became an interest in high school.”
Cassidy recalls that a during his senior year in high school, one of the athletic trainers that visited his school was injured, and he was asked if he wanted to view the knee replacement surgery. Later the same day, Cassidy himself was injured and returned to the ER where the surgeon who had done the knee replacement operation worked on his broken wrist. It was there his love for medicine was solidified.
Once he started medical school, he realized orthopedics was the specialty he wanted to pursue.
“I had the fortune, or misfortune, of really loving all of the rotations that I did,” he says. “But I just kept coming back to orthopedics. I think I just love the mechanics of it. When you get in and see the functional restoration you can give the people, it just it hits home… it feels like the right thing.”
After his residency was over, he was asked to consider studying the spine.
“My mentor at the time, Dr. Will Schaffer, was here at UK, and he said, ‘Why don’t you just stay here and just work with me for a year?’ So, I did,” Cassidy says. “Then that led to him saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you stay on and join as a partner in the practice?’ And here I am.”
Much has changed since he started out more than 20 years ago. “The pedicle screws that we put in all the time, they weren’t even around in the 80s. It was the mid- to late-90s that the equipment and instrumentation that we use really modernized,” Cassidy says. “There wasn’t as much known 30, 40 or 50 years ago. To fix a broken bone, you had to put a cast on, and if you didn’t like how it was lining up, you had to wedge the cast. Now, nobody really loves taking care of fractures like that, because it’s really time consuming. The more modern operative techniques, modern technology, has really made it a lot more appealing. We can just do more for people now than we could 30 years ago.”
Wearing Multiple Hats
As department chair, Cassidy says he wants the department to be the pinnacle of care in eastern and central Kentucky. “We are an evolving department, full of people who work tirelessly every day to restore function to our patients,” Cassidy says.
“As long as our daily goal is providing the best patient care, as well as creating a commitment to excellence in education and research, I feel that this will be an easy goal to achieve.”
As the department chair, he says he is responsible to the healthcare system, but is also responsible for his faculty and making sure they have what they need and that their voices are being heard.
“There’s been a lot of digestion of the One Big Beautiful Bill and its effects on the healthcare system, in terms of its implication for insurance programs and from the College of Medicine, what does it do to the student loan program?” he says. “I have meetings and we digest the information and pass it on to
the faculty. And, in the other direction, the faculty has questions, problems, and concerns. It’s my job to advocate for them and make sure that we have what we need to take care of our patients.”
Administrator and Surgeon
Cassidy also works to balance being a surgeon with being an administrator. He still performs spine surgeries and makes it a point to fit patients into his schedule. “I’ve had to cut back a little bit of how many patients I see,” he says. “It just means I have to be more time efficient. If I have some empty spots in my administrative schedule, I’ll add a few extra patient slots here and there.”
Cassidy’s patient base is mostly adults, but occasionally he sees younger patients. Patient issues run from fractured disc herniations all the way up to breaking patient’s spine in order to realign it.
“I really take care of almost every age, from 15 to 90+,” he says. “I would say probably the average is a 50- to 60-year-old with a spine deformity. A lot of the scoliosis surgery in adults is more the 50, 60, and 70-year-olds, but age is pretty meaningless nowadays. One of my healthiest patients was a lady who was 74 at the time. I did a fusion of her spine from T2 in between the shoulder blades all the way down to her pelvis, and she was back to yoga in no time.”
The Kentucky Patient Population
Kentucky’s population presents its own challenges, he says. “The biggest change from when I started practice to now is we have a lot fewer complications, and we’re safer because we know the numbers,” he says. “We know where things have to be pre-operatively for things like weight, blood pressure, body mass index. We know that if your BMI is over 40, your risk of complication with spine surgery goes up significantly. So, if it’s a situation where you’re going to be paralyzed if you don’t have surgery, or it’s something that hurts and is more elective, we have a real frank discussion about the risks if we proceed.”
While the future of the orthopedic specialty will focus on minimally invasive techniques, Cassidy says his department will be focused on outcomes and patient success. In the last four years, patient volume continues to grow with increased patient visits.
- FY22 – 61,724
- FY23 – 64,982
- FY24 – 69,902
- FY25 – 73,708
“There’s a lot more focus now on outcomes and trying to do these things in different ways,” he says. “We can take care of this broken bone, but which way leads to the best outcomes for the largest groups?”
Above all, he says, he will continue to focus on craftmanship and compassion for himself, the patients, and the members of his department.
“I want us to be able to take care of Central Kentucky and southeastern Kentucky. I want us to be the go-to resource where patients go when nobody else can figure it out,” he says. “Sometimes the right thing is a big surgery. You just have to consider it all. We understand the parameters a lot better now. X-rays and MRIs lead to these outcomes. That’s why you want to go to somebody who’s up on the latest techniques, because we are here more than anything to help our patients make decisions. You have to know your stuff to be able to do that. I can help them execute the decision they make, but I’m really here to help them make a decision about what their best outcome is.”