Making specialty growth operations a game | Amy Seehafer, COO, OSMS | Ep. 4

Operations teams in specialty healthcare know what growth feels like from the inside: more clinics, more providers, more volume, and a back-office that's always running behind. This episode looks at how a COO with a fresh-eyed perspective manages that pressure without letting the organization come apart.ㅤJoe Zboch sits down with Amy Seehafer, COO of Orthopedic & Sports Medicine Specialists (OSMS), a physician-owned practice with 40+ providers, 9 locations, and $100M+ in annual revenue across northeast Wisconsin. Amy came from 20 years in HR and shared services operations outside of healthcare. This is her first year and a half in the industry, and she uses that perspective to ask questions her peers stopped asking long ago.ㅤ👤 Guest BioAmy Seehafer is the COO of OSMS, where she oversees enterprise operations, people strategy, and financial performance across 9 clinical locations and $100M+ in annual revenue. She holds an MBA and dual senior HR certifications (SPHR and SHRM-SCP). Before joining OSMS in September 2024, she spent 20+ years leading shared services operations, organizational design, change management, and HR strategy across complex multi-site environments. Healthcare was new. The ops discipline wasn't.ㅤ📌 What We CoverWhy Amy's three-part framework — people, process, technology — runs in that exact order, and what happens when practices skip the first two stepsHow OSMS implemented patient self-scheduling across 9 locations and the "stabilize before you optimize" rule that kept it from derailingThe stop/start/continue method OSMS uses to audit processes without the baggage of how things have always been doneWhat Amy and her team discovered by shadowing departments they don't normally work in, and what gets noticed that insiders missThe Goldilocks problem of labor optimization during growth: always slightly over or under, never quite rightHow formal project management and change management made a new clinic opening feel, in Amy's words, easyAdvice for directors moving toward COO-level roles: learn the inputs and outputs of the business before pulling any leversㅤ🔗 Resources MentionedOrthopedic & Sports Medicine Specialists (OSMS)Hatch — mentioned in the episode outro