If orthopaedic surgeons stop showing up, who decides what our profession becomes? We sit down with Dr. Fred Azar, past president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, a longtime leader and current Department Chair at Campbell Clinic Orthopaedics, to talk about the future of organizational involvement in orthopaedic surgery and why it matters more than ever as healthcare grows more complex.

We get practical about the pressures surgeons feel right now: hospital employment, limited reimbursement for memberships, shrinking time, and the reality that many clinicians no longer want to “fly to learn.” Dr. Azar argues that the winning model is not meeting-based societies but connected knowledge networks where education, mentorship, data science, AI, and shared outcomes move fast and reach surgeons where they live. The standard for engagement changes too: it has to be meaningful, efficient, and clearly tied to impact for patients.

If you care about the future of musculoskeletal care, this is a conversation about unity, credibility, and showing up before someone else writes the rules. Subscribe for more, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with your take: what would make organizational involvement worth your time today?

Ballistic missiles overhead at 2 a.m. Surgeons back in the OR at sunrise. A city buying groceries and sending kids to school while medevacs arrive around the clock. That contrast is the setting for our conversation with Dr. Roman Hayda, Chief of Orthopaedic Trauma at Rhode Island Hospital and a retired US Army colonel who has traveled to Ukraine repeatedly to support frontline trauma hospitals.

We trace how his Ukrainian roots and military surgical career shaped a calling for war surgery, then zoom in on what makes the current conflict medically different. With contested airspace and relentless drone surveillance, traditional evacuation assumptions collapse. When you can’t fly a helicopter and you can’t safely drive into the kill zone, the “golden hour” becomes a moving target and the downstream impact shows up in limb salvage decisions, prolonged tourniquet times, infection risk, and a growing need for amputation care and complex reconstruction.

We also dig into leadership lessons for any orthopaedic surgeon considering humanitarian work: arrive with humility, listen first, adapt to limited resources, and treat teaching as a two-way exchange. Finally, we talk practical ways to help even if you never get on a plane, from donating external fixation resources to supporting reputable NGOs and advocating for sustained support.

Subscribe for more conversations on the future of orthopaedic surgery, share this with a colleague who cares about trauma systems and global surgery, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway or question.

“I’m fine” is one of the most expensive sentences in health care, because it can hide pain, lost function, fear, and stalled recovery. We talk with Dr. Judy Baumhauer, a national leader in orthopaedic surgery and outcomes measurement, about how patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) give patients a real voice in their care and give clinicians a clearer signal about what’s working.

We get specific about PROMIS and why computer adaptive testing can measure physical function, pain interference, and even depression in just a few minutes, then trend those scores across an episode of care. Dr. Baumhauer explains how her team scaled PROMs from orthopaedics to a system-wide workflow, how results show up in the electronic health record, and why the numbers are most powerful when they spark a better conversation rather than replace one.

Then we zoom out to the future of value-based care in orthopaedics: CMS requirements, public reporting, bundled payments, and the risk of choosing the wrong instrument. We dig into why certain mandated surveys can blur pain and function, how comorbidities and ceiling effects can skew “improvement,” and why PROMIS crosswalks could help standardize reporting while lowering implementation costs.

If you care about patient-centered care, orthopaedic quality measurement, and where reimbursement is heading, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with your take: should PROMIS become the default language for outcomes reporting?