All orthopaedic surgeons need 40 hours of self-assessment exam (SAE) credits for each 10-year American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery Maintenance of Certification (MOC) cycle, and AAOS registries offer an efficient way to earn these credits. AAOS Fellows whose hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), and private practices participate in the AAOS Registry Program are entitled to 10 hours of SAE credit for the MOC Part II assessment for each year of registry participation.

This is a tremendous benefit, though very few have taken advantage of this opportunity. Surprisingly, only 25 surgeons in the past two years reached out to the Registry Program to claim their SAE credits.

To put that into perspective, more than 15,000 surgeons participate in the American Joint Replacement Registry, Shoulder & Elbow Registry, and American Spine Registry. Those 25 awardees represent less than 0.16 percent of surgeons who are eligible for credit.

The AAOS Registry Program continues to provide actionable data to inform practice decisions and improve care quality for patients. Each registry participant contributes to this important knowledge base, and the aggregate information is published each year in registry data reports.

In the 2021 to 2022 cycle, investigators produced three dozen papers with collected registry data. The reason SAE credits are available is because each Fellow who participates can review their own data and assess their individual performance on personalized dashboards, which offer comparative analyses of performance with respect to benchmarks and peers.

Before you can get the credit, you will need to ensure that the site (hospital, ASC, private practice) where you’re performing your procedures is participating and submitting data to the Registry Program. Ask at your site or contact a Registry representative at RegistryInfo@aaos.org to verify participation status. Visit aaos.org/registries for more information.

Claiming SAE credit is an easy process:

1. First, reach out to your site’s Authorized Registry User and be added as a “Surgeon Authorized User” in the RegistryInsights^® platform.
2. Once you are added as a Surgeon Authorized User, register, and create a login to access your data. (Note: Steps 1 and 2 are for first-time users. Once you have a login established, the third and fourth steps are all that will be needed to claim credits.)
3. Locate the yellow “Print MOC Coversheet” button located in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Follow the prompts to select the year and download your report.
4. Email the report to AAOS at the email shown, and the credits will be recorded in your MyAAOS portal, alongside your other earned AAOS CME and SAE credits.

It is that simple. An AAOS Registry team member will let you know when the credits hit your account.

The Registry team is consistently updating and rolling out improvements to make it easier for members to use their data to help with patient outcomes. In the coming months, the team is working on fully automating this process to eliminate emailing the report. Additionally, members will soon have the capability to access RegistryInsights directly from their accounts on the AAOS website.

More detailed information about this process can be found online at aaos.org/registries/surgeon-toolkit. If you are interested in becoming a Registry Surgeon Champion, scan the accompanying QR code below to access the AAOS Registry Surgeon Toolkit.

The registries already offer tremendous benefits for stakeholders: patients, surgeons, hospitals, ASCs, private practices, device manufacturers, and payers. The Fracture & Trauma Registry and Musculoskeletal Tumor Registry are the Academy’s newest registries and are continuing to grow, and AAOS is working to expand the amount of patient-reported outcome measurement data collected.

Thank you for participating in the AAOS Registry Program, and please enjoy your well-deserved SAE credits.

Daniel K. Guy, MD, FAAOS, is a member of the AAOS Registry Oversight Committee and a past president of AAOS.