Lifelong Learning Benefits Our Patients

As surgeons, we are all caretakers, and we must put the needs of others ahead of our own. Our profession offers people an opportunity to return to their desired activities, relief from chronic pain, and recovery from serious injury. It is the most rewarding profession on the planet! We all know how lucky we are to be able to contribute in the way that we do. Likewise, we understand the need to be our best and to stay current. Along with us, AAOS understands the need for lifelong learning in the service of others.

Almost a decade ago, the AAOS Board of Directors recognized the importance of younger surgeons in the future of our organization, putting resources into the Resident Assembly and adding resident members to many committees. This group has become mature, with multiple standing committees and contributions to our collective mission.

More recently, with the creation of the Resident Orthopaedic Core Knowledge (ROCK) curriculum, the organization has doubled down on our younger members. The process of lifelong learning begins in residency, and although many organizations have provided excellent resources for residents to use to gain knowledge, a truly independent and complete curriculum was lacking.

AAOS has filled that gap with the expertise of more than 500 volunteer leaders contributing to a curriculum that uses the blueprint of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery Part 1 exam as its skeleton. In addition to complete chapters on all areas, the curriculum is rich with additional resources, including hundreds of videos, Instructional Course Lectures (ICLs), and symposia from the Annual Meeting, as well as AAOS books, journal articles, and monographs.

As the ROCK is fully electronic, it is a living project that is updated annually with new materials from AAOS courses and the Annual Meeting, and one-third of the content is updated every year. It is always up-to-date! All residents have access to this incredible resource for free during their entire residency. Just in the 2023–2024 academic year, there were more than 79,000 logins by residents in 205 programs.

Additionally, programs can use the curriculum in a multitude of ways, including creating class- or resident-specific study programs and tracking residents’ progress as they use the curriculum. Likewise, residents can see their ResStudy dashboards from within the platform. Lastly, all Orthopaedic In-Training Examination^® questions link to ROCK content for consistency. Partnerships are also flourishing, the most recent of which is the inclusion of the wonderful “eHand” content from the American Society for Surgery of the Hand, available in the hand and wrist sections. I believe that the work that the AAOS Education Council and Membership Council have done including and providing resources for residents will help build our future.

Your Education Council has adopted the new Strategic Plan’s goal of being “our members’ professional home throughout their lifetime,” and it is working to meet the needs of our members at all levels. The need for education in practice management has been made clear by our members. AAOS has been developing offerings, starting at the resident level, with a free half-day course at the Annual Meeting that attracted more than 170 attendees.

At the member level, there are support tools for telehealth, a guide to practice models, information for solo and small group practices, practice transitions, a new book on value-based care, and a course in partnership with the American Alliance of Orthopaedic Executives. Additionally, the Orthopaedic Video Theater (OVT) has a dedicated practice-management section covering issues in legislative, financial, legal, and revenue-cycle management.

The Education Council, under the leadership of Andrew H. Schmidt, MD, FAAOS, started the Learning Innovation Lab about a year ago to act as an incubator for new formats. It has already resulted in two new CME offerings. “ICL360” includes curated content from OVT, selected Journal of the AAOS^® (JAAOS^®) articles, and links to external resources. The second, “Diagnosis Spotlight,” focuses on conditions most commonly missed on radiographic studies, for instance carpometacarpal fracture dislocations.

Along with these new formats, we continue to offer 75 to 100 webinars per year that attract more than 15,000 registrants, and the OVT has more than 46,000 monthly users who watch more than 950,000 minutes of video and earned more than 54,000 CME credits so far this year.

AAOS will offer 13 CME courses this year, including skills courses at the OLC; a return to the popular Park City sports course; and in 2025, two pilot courses that provide an intense 2-day dive into multiple specialties, such as trauma, arthroplasty, and arthroscopy. There will be virtual courses on trauma, infection, outpatient joint replacement, and workers’ compensation.

Our journals continue to excel, with JAAOS receiving more than 1,700 submissions last year and JAAOS Global Research & Reviews reaching an impressive impact factor of 2.0. New formats such as JAAOS Unplugged and JAAOS Journal Club podcasts have been downloaded more than a half-million times.

Lastly, under the strong guidance of Matthew Provencher, MD, MBA, MC USNR (Ret.), FAAOS, Annual Meeting Oversight Committee chair, the Annual Meeting continues to become more dynamic. The Annual Meeting Oversight Committee has spent a good deal of the past 3 years looking carefully at data related to how our members utilize the meeting. Major changes have made the meeting more flexible and exciting. ICLs have been shortened to be more impactful and match the desires of the members. Many new formats have been added, including debates, the Orthopaedic Influencer Series, the incredible OrthoDome^® video theater, and an app that allows for artificial intelligence–based recommendations. This past year, the inaugural OrthoPitch event occurred, a Shark Tank–like environment to highlight the newest technologies and thoughts in our field.

Our Strategic Plan calls for AAOS to support our members from residency to retirement, and our Education Council along with our incredible staff and thousands of member volunteers are constantly working to meet this need. Please look to learn.aaos.org for anything you need, and let the Education Council know what is on your mind.

Paul Tornetta III, MD, PhD, FAAOS, is the 2024–2025 AAOS president and the director of orthopaedic trauma at Boston Medical Center. He is also professor and chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine of Boston University.