Running five clinic locations, 30 physicians, and 50+ PAs and therapists while opening a sixth site takes more than a good plan. It takes someone who knows exactly which dials to turn and when to leave them alone.

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In this episode, Joe Zboch sits down with Kelli Anderson, COO at DMOS Orthopaedic Centers in Des Moines, Iowa, to talk about what operational growth actually looks like inside a large, independent orthopedic group.

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The conversation covers how DMOS decided to grow their workers' comp service line, the technology gap they found, and the referral portal they built to close it, their process for surfacing ideas from staff, and how Kelli thinks about AI in a way that's grounded in actual operations rather than hype. If you're scaling a specialty group and trying to keep the clinical machine running while also building what's next, this one's for you.

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👤 Guest Bio

Kelli Anderson is the Chief Operating Officer at DMOS Orthopaedic Centers, where she's been for over seven years, first as Director of Revenue Cycle, now running operations across all five locations. Before DMOS, she held VP and Director-level roles at Ciox Health, a national health information management company, with deep expertise in ICD-10 coding, clinical documentation, and revenue cycle optimization.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Kelli thinks about keeping daily operations stable while pushing major organizational growth initiatives, and why "keeping the temperature" is the actual job
• The quarterly employee focus group model DMOS uses to surface frontline ideas, and why one of those conversations changed their social media strategy
• How DMOS used peer benchmarking through The OrthoForum to identify workers' comp as a growth opportunity worth investing in across people, process, and technology
• The honest assessment process DMOS ran on their workers' comp service line, feedback gathering, gap analysis, and ultimately landed on a communication portal as the fix
• Why workers' comp referrals function more like B2B relationships than standard provider referrals, and what that means for how you build your technology stack
• How Kelli approaches moments when a project hits a wall, fix-it mode vs. step-back mode, and how to tell which one the situation calls for
• The framework DMOS used to choose Norwalk, Iowa, for their sixth location, zip code heat maps, housing growth data, and a little bit of luck
• How DMOS is already deploying AI in their call center and urgent injury clinics, and Kelli's filter for deciding which AI to adopt and which to watch from a distance

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• DMOS Orthopaedic Centers, a Des Moines-based independent orthopedic group, has five locations (sixth opening in Norwalk, Iowa)
• The OrthoForum, a national organization of privately-owned orthopedic practices; DMOS has been a member for several years
• Hatch, a referral operations platform for specialty healthcare