Tristate Brain & Spine Institute

Tristate Brain and Spine Institute Brings Advanced Spine Treatment Options to Minnesota
Alexandria, MN - May 4th, 2015

Dr. H. R. Abbasi, a pioneer in advanced minimally invasive surgical services, is committed to providing the most innovative neurological spinal surgery options to rural Minnesota. He is board-certified with the American Board of Neurological Surgery and trained for over 23 years at some of the world’s most prestigious medical institutions, including Stanford University, Dartmouth College and the University of Texas, MD Anderson.

Dr. Abbasi moved to Minnesota in 2012, bringing his revolutionary minimally invasive spine techniques to Tristate Brain and Spine Institute (TBSI) in Alexandria, MN. Dr. Abbasi helped build TBSI with a multimillion dollar personal investment. He built the organization from the ground up, providing state of the art medical technologies to rural MN, including one of only three upright, tilting open MRI machines in the USA. Dr. Abbasi has made Alexandria, MN his home base, providing the only regionally dedicated neurosurgical practice in the community.

Of immediate concern for Dr. Abbasi on arrival in MN was the deficiency of appropriate advanced spinal technologies available to perform the Oblique Lateral Lumbar Interbody Fusion (OLLIF) in MN. The OLLIF is a minimally invasive interbody spine fusion pioneered by Dr. Abbasi, the foremost surgeon nationally and internationally in this procedure. The procedure is performed via multiple incisions, each half an inch long, without cutting or separating muscle from bone and thus keeping the integrity of spinal column intact. Surgeries that could take up to 4-5 hours using traditional methods can now be done so under one hour with 1/10 of the blood loss experienced in traditional surgery. This makes recovery much quicker and puts patients back to regular life much faster than traditional open surgery.

In a desire to provide this revolutionary surgical option to his patients, Dr. Abbasi was an early investor in a local medical device company which was critical to providing the technology, opportunity, and infrastructure needed to introduce the OLLIF in Minnesota. His support allowed the company the time and resources needed to establish a presence in the Minnesota market while enabling providers the opportunity to offer the OLLIF as a surgical treatment for spine surgery patients. This investment represented a great deal of personal and financial risk for Dr. Abbasi, but he believed in the value and importance of the OLLIF and chose to invest in Minnesota and the company. He has since been able to divest his shares in the company as he felt the OLLIF technology was firmly established in MN. Dr. Abbasi is now concentrating on the development and education in minimally invasive spine care patent pending technology.

While Dr. Abbasi believes strongly in the value and revolutionary outcomes associated with the OLLIF, he strongly advocates surgery as a last resort. To this end, he has implemented rigorous protocols designed to protect TBSI patients. The protocols represent a new benchmark and standard that exceeds currently established patient advocacy guidelines. These strict patient selection protocols are based on the recommendations from renowned neurosurgery societies including the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, and Association of Neurological Surgeons.

Throughout their experience at TBSI, Dr. Abbasi’s surgical candidates follow a strict conservative therapy process. These protocols ensure that patients are assessed for, and are provided, options for pain management, therapeutic site injections, physical therapy prior to ever being considered for surgery. His strict conservative therapy protocol implementation has provided a clinic visit to surgery ratio of 8.2%. This ratio is significantly below the national average of 10-12%.

Dr. Abbasi’s conservative patient protocols include:
• Check list including all above mentioned point of therapy has been established.

• A clinical standard established whereby patients are encouraged and assisted in seeking a second opinion for any surgical recommendations made by Dr. Abbasi.

• Adherence to a compliance algorithm containing statistics comparing surgical and non-surgical options. When the algorithm determines the options are close or equal, policy dictates the recommendation of non-surgical measures.

• Provision of the highest level of evidence based medicine. All the results from Dr. Abbasi’s surgeries are meticulously collected and evaluated by independent biostatisticians, rigorously monitoring the results that are being published in scientific media. This carefully analyzed data showed the tremendous advantage of Dr. Abbasi's techniques in spinal fusion, in lumbar spine, in thoracic spine, for correction of deformity and scoliosis, spondylolisthesis, and many other spinal pathologies.

Dr. Abbasi is concentrating his effort on refining this revolutionary technique. He has built a medical blog currently followed by more than 10,000 professionals worldwide, promoting this Minnesota refined innovation internationally (www.facebook.com\NSReview, www.backachedoctor.com). He is in the process of building a center of excellence to attract a national and international patient population to Minnesota for this unequalled spine care. He has heavily invested in research and development to bring spine surgery in Minnesota far ahead of technical and scientific development worldwide. Additionally he is concentrating greatly on patient education in his social media blog www.facebook.com\NSPatient.


This technology is far ahead of current available care and in the spirit of the innovation and in the best interest of our patients; TBSI would like to invite all involved in spine care to join us in providing this innovative care to our community and help make Minnesota a medical destination, nationally and internationally. Dr. Abbasi has continuously reached out to the local medical community presenting his rigorously collected data in an evidence based practice of medicine. Additionally, he is building a teaching center for this technology locally in Minnesota for a national and international audience. This has already attracted significant number of patients locally and nationally to his practice making him one of the busiest Minnesotan neurosurgeons. Dr. Abbasi is inviting the medical community to be part of this Minnesota success story.