AAOS/BOC Fall Meeting Update
Nashville, Tennessee • September 18-20, 2014

By N. Douglas Boardman, MD

The 2014 AAOS Fall meeting took place in Nashville from September 18—20. Three VOS members—Wilford Gibson, Dave Romness, and Doug Boardman—attended as members of the Board of Councilors (BOC), while Bill Jiranek attended as a member of the Board of Specialty Societies (BOS). They all participated in two full days of meetings and symposia, during which the BOS and BOC discussed a wide array of topics of mutual interest and heard numerous lectures from invited speakers. The active issues addressed in the symposia included the following – payment models, the Sunshine Act, PPACA implementation, team management, narcotic use/abuse by orthopaedic patients, national performance measures initiatives, and online reputation management in healthcare.

The VOS was fortunate to be the recipient of two grants from AAOS at the meeting. A grant for $20,000 was designated by the State Legislative and Regulatory Issues Committee (after some lobbying by the VOS attendees) toward VOS efforts to combat pending legislation in the Virginia Assembly aimed at outlawing physician-owned distributorships (PODs). Currently, PODs do not exist in Virginia, but this fight is viewed by AAOS as a test case for the rest of the nation. The State Orthopaedic Societies Committee also allocated just over $2,000 to the VOS for the implementation of e-posters at the VOS Annual Meeting. This funding should allow increased abstract acceptance and bring the VOS in line with the AAOS and specialty societies with regard to the integration of this technology into the meeting.