Boden sisters bring new energy and teamwork to UofL Health Orthopedics Surgery
LOUISVILLE It’s not every day you get to work with your sisters, and it’s even more rare when you’re one of a set of triplets and you’re all in medicine.
But for Drs. Lauren, Stephanie, and Allison Boden, being in the same field with family members is just part of their life. The three sisters work together at UofL Health in orthopedic surgery – Lauren as a spine surgeon, Stephanie as sports medicine surgeon, and Allison as a foot and ankle surgeon. All three are assistant professors of orthopedic surgery at the UofL School of Medicine, and Allison is also the associate program director for the orthopedic surgery residency program. Working together comes easily, as these three have worked together since their days on the baseball diamond growing up. At one point, the three girls and their younger sister were the entire infield for their high school and college softball teams. While there wasn’t a plan for them to work together, the opportunity presented itself and was too good to pass up.
The three came to UofL Health after Lauren reached out to the chair, Nicholas Ahn, MD, about a job.
“We didn’t think it was going to be possible to work in the same city, let alone the same health system,” Lauren says. “At the end of the call, [Dr. Ahn] basically said there was room to hire all three of us if we got along and were interested, and we were like, yes, we’re best friends, and we would love to make something like that work.” The three then all came to interview formally, and felt it was a great fit. The Boden sisters grew up in a suburb of Atlanta and all three earned their bachelor’s degrees from Pomona College in Claremont, California. They played softball, basketball, and golf at Pomona before returning to Emory University School of Medicine for their medical degrees.
After medical school, the three went their separate ways for training. Lauren completed her orthopedic surgery residency at the University of Pennsylvania and then went on to complete a combined orthopedic and neurological spine fellowship at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.
Stephanie completed her residency at the University of Pittsburgh and then went on to do a sports medicine and shoulder fellowship at Rush University in Chicago. While in fellowship, she served as a team physician for the Chicago Bulls, Chicago White Sox, and DePaul University and currently specializes in minimally invasive arthroscopic and advanced
open reconstruction procedures of the shoulder, elbow, and knee.
Allison completed her residency at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital. She was named the Outstanding Resident of the Year during her PGY-5 year and then completed a foot and ankle fellowship at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.
The Road to Louisville
Coming to UofL Health started with a phone call, Lauren says.
“I actually set up a phone call to just learn about Louisville and the program here,” she says. “At the end of the call, Dr. Ahn asked what my sisters were up to. And I was like, oh, we’re all actually looking for academic jobs.”
When the opportunity came for them to work together, they each came to the decision on their own, they say.
“We all came and interviewed at UofL Health and liked it for our own individual reasons,” Lauren says. “We ended up kind of picking it alone but also knowing that we’d be here together.”
The sisters come from a long line of doctors. Both of their parents are doctors – their father, Scott Boden, MD, is an orthopedic spine surgeon, and their mother, Mary Caulfield, MD, Boden, was an internist. While their father was the first in his family to graduate from college, many family members on their mother’s side were doctors. Their mother’s parents were also doctors – the grandfather, Walter Harry Caulfield, Jr., MD, was an interventional cardiologist, and their grandmother, Mary Sisk Caulfield, MD, was a general practitioner whose father, Walter Harry Caulfield, MD, the Boden sisters’ great-grandfather, was a general surgeon. Two of their uncles are also in medicine – one is a plastic surgeon, Walter Harry Caulfield, III, MD, and the other is an interventional cardiologist, Michael Caulfield, MD. Both of them also married physicians – an orthopedic hand surgeon, Kathryn Caulfield, MD, and a neurologist, Anna Caulfield, MD.
Even their younger sister, Susanne Boden, MD, just completed an orthopedic surgery residency and will be completing a hand and upper extremity surgery fellowship at Wake Forest this upcoming academic year. Medicine, Lauren says, was just something they grew up with. But working together at the same hospital didn’t always seem to be something that could happen, Allison says. When asked to come interview in Louisville the sisters welcomed the idea. “We were like, at the very least, we’ll have a weekend together, because we’d been living in separate cities for the prior five and a half years at that point,” Allison says. “But once we got here, it seemed like the best fit for all of us.”
“I knew I was going to do something in medicine from the time I was a kid,” Lauren says. “I went straight from wanting to be a professional baseball player to wanting to be a doctor. I didn’t have a whole lot of other things I was even interested in… For a while. I thought I was going to be a sports surgeon, then I did my spine rotation, and absolutely loved it. Even though my dad’s a spine surgeon, and I was trying to do something different, I ended up just liking it too much to do anything else.”
Orthopedics Has a PatientRich Population
Since the three sisters started at UofL Health in September 2024, they have been able to find their niche.
Lauren says she works with a wide variety of patients from young athletes with spine fractures or spondylolisthesis, to middle aged patients with herniated disks, and older patients with generative changes like arthritis or myelopathy “It’s a bit of everything, which is one of the reasons I like the spine so much,” she says. “Sometimes it’s something that’s been slow and degenerative over time, and sometimes it’s an acute trauma. I enjoy finding ways to help patients feel better and get back on their feet.”
For Stephanie, the love of sports medicine came after a sports injury. She says she was initially thinking about a career in teaching until she hurt her shoulder playing softball after her freshman year in college. After rehab failed to help, she ended up having shoulder surgery.
“That was probably my first exposure to orthopedics on the patient side,” she says. “Growing up, we’d had a couple broken noses, a couple concussions, nothing else too crazy, but when I was able to recover from surgery and get back to softball – that was a big moment for me. I was like, ‘Okay, maybe medicine is kind of cool.’”
An internship at the Women’s Sports Medicine program at the Hospital for Special Surgery during a summer in college allowed her to work with female sports surgeons, which is when she feels things started to click and she became excited for the possibility of becoming an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon. This experience solidified her choice to apply to medical school.
Stephanie says she’s able to see a wide variety of patients as well. Her shoulder patients range in age from kids with overuse injuries to older patients with arthritis. Most of her shoulder practice involves minimally invasive shoulder scopes as well as open complex shoulder reconstruction and shoulder replacements. For her work on knees, she sees a range of patients including those with ligament tears, meniscal and cartilage injuries, with a special focus on joint preservation.
Allison says she knew from a young age that she was going to be a doctor. After a summer shadowing orthopedic surgeons at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, she knew that orthopedics was what she wanted to do. “Growing up with surgeons in the family and watching a lot of medical TV shows, we had seen operating rooms from afar… but the in-person experience kind of solidified my decision to go to medical school. I really liked the hands-on aspect of surgery,” she says.
When it came to choosing a specialty, her family’s medical background came into play.
“With my dad being in orthopedics, I thought I’d try to find something else but that didn’t really last very long,” Allison says. “I would have told you that I was most likely going into sports because we had experience with sports. I really liked the patient population. I liked the minimally invasive aspect of most of the surgeries. But then I did a rotation on foot and ankle, and I realized that there was a large breadth of things that you can do
– trauma, sport-focused surgeries, total ankle replacements… and I liked the breadth of cases that you could do.”
Orthopedics Has a Bright Future
For now, the three are settling into their current positions, while looking to the future. Lauren says she’s looking forward to changes within her spine surgery specialty. “I think the main thing for spine is that the surgeries in the late 90s and early 2000s were fusion-based surgeries, and now there’s a push towards less invasive surgery and motion
sparing techniques,” she says. “I know of a couple different types of arthroplasty and arthroplasty equivalents, where you don’t nec – essarily have to fuse. There are also endoscopic techniques where you’re actually using a scope to visualize the spine, which is about as mini – mally invasive as you can get.”
Stephanie is looking forward continued advancements with sports medicine, joint preservation, biologics, and artificial intel – ligence. With improvements in technology, surgical planning and execution continue to improve and sports surgeries are becoming increasingly patient-specific. In addition, she is incorporating her undergraduate psychol – ogy degree into her sports medicine practice.
“There’s a lot of work actually going into psychology and sports medicine right now, and there are a lot of things that we didn’t really think about in the past, as far as psycho – logical readiness, not only for getting back to a sport, but also for surgery and expectations. So, I think we’re paying a lot more attention to the psychology of things right now. It’s defi – nitely something that I take into account and try to give patients and their families a full layout of all the expectations ahead of time.”
For Allison, the foot and ankle work she does is constantly changing with new and improved technology.
“If you look at hot topics, right now minimally invasive surgery is becoming more popular she says. “Additionally, there is more work being done on patient specific instrumentation. I hope that there will be robots for total ankles upcoming in the next few years because I think that may help improve the accuracy and precision in making bony cuts and potentially balancing the ankle. In the sports world, I think there’s an emphasis on figuring out biologics in the foot and ankle space.”
The Patient’s Quality of Life
Through it all, the sisters are motivated to continue to help their patients find a better quality of life after injury or disease.
“It is rewarding to get patients back on their feet and doing the activities they love. That’s enough to keep me going, and I love it” says Allison.