Red Sox look for efficiency with revamped medical staff
The team named Laurence J. Ronan its new medical director and Dan Dyrek its sports medicine service coordinator, with Pete Asnis continuing as head team orthopedist, Rick Jameyson as head athletic trainer and Jim Rowe as medical operations coordinator.
Several other staffers, including Masai Takahashi, Brad Pearson, Par Sandora, Mike Boyle, Russell Nya and Tara Mardigan, will remain in their current positions.
"What we're trying to do is finish off a restructuring that really began last winter, and get to a system that we think captures appropriately the different specialties within the medical realm," Cherington said earlier Thursday at the General Managers Meetings. "We're trying to build a system that balances those effectively, and doing it in a way that the players have people who fully have their best interest in mind and are at the top of their profession.
"We got 60 or 70 yards down the field last winter. Hopefully we're trying to get in the end zone now."
Ronan, who owns degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, will continue to serve as head team internist as he has since 2005. A staff physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, he also serves as senior advisor to the Center for the Medical Integration of Innovative Technology, as director of the Thomas S. Durant, MD, Fellowship in Refugee Medicine at MGH, and as a senior advisor to the Red Sox Foundation/Mass General Hospital Home Base Program.
Dyrek, who graduated summa cum laude with a DPT from Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., joined the medical staff as a clinical consultant during the 2012 season. He "brings over 30 years of experience as a physical therapist specializing in orthopedics and has treated athletes at the professional, Olympic, international, and collegiate levels from across the country," according to a team release.
Cherington intimated that the changes are at least partially in response to the myriad injuries that undermined the Sox in 2012.
"Many of our injuries have been of the traumatic kind, the collisions on the field and things like that that I don't think any medical person can prevent," he said. "But if there's ever a situation where we're missing any time that doesn't have to be missed, or there's an injury we maybe could have prevented, we have to look at that.
"The goals here are not to look back ... but to look forward and try to set up a structure that incorporates the best practices within those specialties, with a group of people who will be fully dedicated to the players, the players will trust, and will have the best interest of the players in mind."
Additional physicians on the revamped staff include: George Theodore, Tom Holovacs, Eric Berkson, Steve Southard, Jim Januzzi and Jeff Bostic from Massachusetts General Hospital; Arun Ramappa from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and Brian Busconi from UMass Memorial Medical Group.
"There may be a position that we add down the road," Cherington said. "But for all intents and purposes, the structure that's in place, hopefully it will work for a long time."