Dr. Chris Christensen founded StubMed after firsthand experience with a problem many surgeons accept – but shouldn’t have to.
Approximately eight years ago, while in the middle of an operative day at a surgery center where he was part owner, Dr. Christensen learned that the cost of surgical togas he routinely used was increasing significantly. What initially sounded like a modest price adjustment quickly revealed itself as a much larger issue: he was spending roughly $250 per case on togas alone, with costs rising to $300 per case – without any meaningful improvement in quality or outcomes. Like many physicians, he had trusted that pricing was reasonable. That moment forced a deeper look into the economics behind routine surgical supplies.
Dr. Christensen explored alternative products already on the market, but the results were disappointing. Rather than compromising on performance or safety, he made a decision uncommon for a busy surgeon: to create a better solution himself. StubMed was born out of that decision – grounded in the belief that surgeons deserve high-quality, responsibly priced products that support patient safety without unnecessary cost inflation.
From the beginning, Dr. Christensen was directly involved in the design and development process. StubMed partnered with FDA-approved manufacturers and navigated extensive testing, regulatory requirements, and competitive pressures – including entrenched contracts designed to exclude new entrants. After early challenges with costly intermediaries, the company ultimately succeeded in eliminating the middleman, allowing StubMed to deliver the level of savings it was originally created to achieve – without sacrificing quality or compliance.
Dr. Christensen’s perspective is shaped by decades of clinical experience. Born in Argentina in 1966 to Danish and Argentine parents, he immigrated to the United States as a child. His interest in medicine was sparked early by his father, a pharmacist who later pursued dental school. Dr. Christensen went on to attend Hamilton College in upstate New York, earned his medical degree from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1992, completed his orthopedic surgery residency at Duke University Medical Center, and finished a fellowship in hip and knee surgery at New England Baptist Hospital.
He then served four years in the U.S. Navy at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, before settling in Lexington in 2003. Over the course of his 26-year career, Dr. Christensen has performed approximately 15,000 joint replacements, including more than 9,000 hip replacements and 2,500 partial knee replacements. His clinical focus expanded to outpatient joint replacement surgery beginning in 2014, and his role as an investor in a specialty surgery center further deepened his understanding of the operational and economic realities faced by modern surgical facilities.
StubMed is a direct extension of that experience. The StubMed toga has been used at Dr. Christensen’s own surgery center for more than three years across hip, knee, partial knee, and total hip replacements. During that time, approximately 6,000 joint replacements have been performed using roughly 25,000 togas, with an overall infection rate of less than 0.2%.
Despite his work in medical supply innovation, Dr. Christensen remains first and foremost a practicing surgeon who values patient care. StubMed was not created to disrupt medicine from the outside, but to improve it from within – by a physician who understands both the clinical and economic pressures faced by today’s surgical teams, and who believes that better outcomes and responsible costs do not have to be at odds.
