NASS Executive Director and CEO Eric Muehlbauer discusses NASS’s new Innovation NetWORK Summit in an interview with SmartTRAK.
SmartTRAK Senior Analyst Erin Dorgan interviewed North American Spine Society (NASS) Executive Director and CEO Eric Muehlbauer, MJ, CAE, at the new NASS Innovation NetWORK Summit held June 20-21, 2025 in Chicago. The Innovation NetWORK Summit is a novel meeting where surgeons, engineers, medtech and other spine professional can network and collaborate about bringing innovative spine devices to market.
To find out more about this new meeting, click on the following video to listen to the interview (11:46 min). A link to download a complete transcript of the interview is also provided below.
Interview Transcript
SmartTRAK: Hi, this is Erin Dorgan with SmartTRAK. Today I am talking with Eric Muehlbauer, CEO and executive director of the North American Spine Society. Eric, thank you for taking the time to meet with me today. Can you share a little bit more about the meeting? Why is it important? And give some more details behind it.
Eric Muehlbauer: Thanks for having me on. We're very interested to see where this goes. NASS has always evolved as it needed to based on what's going on in the field. For a long time we were almost viewed as anti-industry with our ethics rules and things like that. What we've realized is that the field needs us to help stimulate innovation. There's lots of people who do innovation-type meetings or different tracks. We've got a particular reputation in the field, especially with payers, that might make this a little bit more interesting and get a little more traction. So I kind of call where we're at now, NASS 3.0, because we've had to evolve because of ...
Click the button below to download and read the complete transcript of SmartTRAK's interview with NASS Executive Director and CEO Eric Muehlbauer, conducted by Erin Dorgan, SmartTRAK Sr. Analyst, Spine & Bone Replacement.