Gem City Bone & Joint: A Laramie Success Story

Gem City Bone & Joint Center has been in Laramie since the 1970′s, and in that time the practice has become a household name not only in Laramie but also across the state of Wyoming. I got a chance to sit down and talk with Trent Kaufman who has been the Executive Director of the practice’s surgery center in Laramie for the past 16 years. Throughout that time, he has seen the Laramie practice continually grow to serve more and more people throughout the region, and that trend is continuing. 

If you have driven past the center on Grand Avenue lately, you have probably noticed the construction going on outside, but they are also making some other changes with the biggest being a change in name. Gem City Bone & Joint is no more, and the practice has begun to re-brand itself as the Premier Bone & Joint Center. When I asked Trent why they decided to change the name after almost four decades as Gem City Bone & Joint, his answer was simple; growth!

The center started in 1973 as a small orthopedic practice with one doctor, David A. Kieffer, in a dark basement office of the Odd Fellow’s Building in Laramie. Dr. Kieffer was joined by Dr. Robert J. Curnow shortly after that in 1976, at which time Doctors Kieffer and Curnow renamed their practice, “Gem City Bone & Joint.” Trent told me that it was at this was when the practice moved out of the small basement office and began to expand into what it has become today, employing 10 doctors and a staff of over 120 in the now 33,000 square foot surgery center.

As more and more doctors joined the Gem City Bone & Joint practice over the years, the need throughout the state of Wyoming for specialists and sub-specialists to care for its people was evident as some were traveling long distances to the facility. This helped drive expansion as satellite clinics opened in nearby cities like Cheyenne, Wheatland, and Rawlins. Today the practice has achieved a great reach, serving 80 percent of the population of Wyoming, as well as to the populations of neighboring communities in northeast Colorado, western Nebraska, and western South Dakota.

The same ten doctors based out of Laramie actually see patients in all of these satellite communities, and the logistics of how they pull this off is pretty interesting. When there were only a few satellite community clinics, doctors of course drove. However as clinics opened in places like Casper, Riverton, Gillette, Rock Springs and Green River, the distance became an obstacle as well as speeding tickets for the doctors trying to make it to their appointments on time. Because of this, the practice began buying airplanes. Today they own four King Air twin prop planes that criss-cross the state daily as the practice’s pilots transport doctors to see their patients. Trent told me that their pilots calculated the distance they flew in one year between clinics to be equal to that of flying around the world nine times! Who would have guessed that a Bone & Joint Center also operates a small airline.      

Even with extensive growth, the practice is still centered right here in Laramie where a majority of patients travel from their satelite clinics in other communities for surgery. This of course means that the Laramie facility not only has a variety of very specialized bone and joint doctors, but also some very high tech equipment. Trent let me take a look at their relatively new full body MRI machine and explained that it was technology not often found in an orthopedic clinic. The picture below on the left shows the massive MRI machine itself and the one on the left shows the whole room of equipment it takes to make the machine function and keep it’s magnets cooled on a continuous basis.

Well there you have it, a local success story grown out of a small Laramie basement office in the Odd Fellow’s Building to a major Surgery Center helping people from all over the state located right in our back yard. Gem City Bone and joint in the end has turned out to be a gem in the City of Laramie.