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CME OnDemand: 2022 AOFAS Annual Meeting
Presidential Remarks and Awards Presentation
Presidential Remarks and Awards Presentation
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Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for being with us here in Quebec City for our 38th summer and now annual AOFS meeting. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have served as your 53rd president and recognize that the highlight for today is surely our incoming president, Dr. Brian Den Hartog, so I'd like to keep my outgoing address fairly brief. In reflecting on this past year, I was unable to summarize our collective effort any better than the late Maya Angelou, a decorated American poet, writer, and civil rights activist. She famously said, I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. On behalf of our board, I hope you feel that we've listened when you've spoken and tried to incorporate your feedback as part of a team effort to improve our great society. I hope you feel we've met your expectations and experienced at least a few small gains this year because of you. I don't plan to spend time today going over what AOFS specifically accomplished during the year, partly because you can read about that and all of these things in the 2021 annual report, as well as in the 2022 in stride that just came out, but mostly because these really aren't my accomplishments, they are yours, and I'd like to use this moment to thank all of you for where we are today. In 1906, Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, performed an experiment in England offering a prize to whoever of 787 villagers could correctly guess the weight of an almost 1,200-pound ox. He found that the single most accurate answer was the mean of all estimates, which came to within one pound of the actual weight, describing this as the wisdom of crowds. His point that democracy of thought can produce exceptional results, better than even the greatest of experts, is still emulated today, particularly because it becomes a notable advantage in large and diverse bodies, like our AOFS and board, to think what greater things will happen to us as we continue to grow and become even more diverse in the years ahead. Recently, Dr. Mary Brindle gave grand rounds on systems improvement that had another aspirational message that I feel is equally apropos for our society regarding where we are now and where we should be tomorrow. She focused on healthy organizations that try to improve constantly and forever. This is indeed how I believe AOFS functions. Each year, we build upon the successes of our past leaders to ensure the successes of our future leaders. We continually adapt, ideally doing so with neither singular credit nor blame. We ebb, flow, and grow. We transform together. Among our U.K. guests in Quebec City backdrop, let me restate this in a more familiar history, which became a U.S. naval rallying cry during the War of 1812, following Captain James Lawrence's attempt to defend the USS Chesapeake against Her Majesty's ship, the Shannon, in Boston Harbor. Let us never give up the ship. Colleagues, friends, staff, family, significant others, and everyone else with us as part of this meeting, thank you for entrusting me to serve this great society. Wherever you may be today, thank you for being in attendance, and please take the time to enjoy one another in the remainder of our days here in Quebec. Allow me to complete this address by expressing a few final points of appreciation. I'll start with an acknowledgement of our tremendous annual and pre-meeting co-chairs, Drs. Humberd, Gus, Hogan, and Hunt. They've worked so hard to produce for us an incredible scientific program, with great speakers, cutting-edge science, and a breadth of participants that nicely represents the diversity of our society. Thank you all so much. Can we please give them a round of applause? I'd also like to acknowledge our Canadian hosts and recognize our many invited special guest lecturers, all of whom are becoming the stuff of legend as some of our world's brightest stars and greatest examples. Let me thank you for sharing your knowledge with us, along with our many other AOFAS colleagues, who've also taken the time to be here this week to share their own talents and expertise. We in the AOFAS should feel very fortunate. AOFAS is equally blessed to be able to host this year's guest nation, the United Kingdom. A tremendous debt of gratitude to all of you as well, who've made this trip across the pond to contribute so greatly to our meeting and to our interactions and to our relationships and to our bridge-building. Surely, I couldn't have asked for a better Board of Directors this past year, and similarly wish to thank each member of the AOFAS and Foundation Board for all your hard work, commitment, and guidance, things I was able to count on every day. You have been invaluable to me and for our AOFAS. Certainly, our many committees and their leadership remain the true Ferrari engine of this organization, so I deeply thank all of you, while also wanting to recognize our many other volunteers and again welcome our current resident scholars, all the lifeblood of our future. We also could not do without our many industry partners and our other philanthropic members who share our core values and whose many contributions are so critical to our mission. We are a better, more impactful society because of these partnerships. Please know that we remain grateful. The real glue of AOFAS is our incredibly dedicated staff. Not a week has gone by during my tenure that I was not relying on Elaine and her entire team for their advice, assistance, and leadership, including this week and this terrific meeting. What a fantastic staff we have in so many ways. Can we please also give them a round of applause? To my partners, you know this year for me would not have been possible without you, so I thank you for all the support you've often provided. And to the many other colleagues and guests within our society who are here in person or attending virtually, AOFAS grows stronger every year because of you. Thank you for your friendship and for every little part of AOFAS you've made even better. To our AOFAS founders and 2022 pillars, including our many other members and leaders who cannot be with us today, but who have inspired and influenced us, our patients, and our society in myriad ways over many years, we, the AOFAS, salute you too as a most grateful organization. To our sons, I am so thankful for all your love and support and for helping us keep life fun and balanced. And a special thank you to all our spouses, partners, and significant others who support all of us and enable everything we do at AOFAS. To my wife, Suti, I love you and I'm blessed you're in my life. Thank you for advising and strengthening me, for always being there, and for helping me keep my sense of humor throughout all these years. And finally, let me thank Brian Den Hartog for many things, including being such an amazing co-pilot this year. It gives me great pleasure to call Mike Arano up here to introduce him so Brian can begin what will be an incredible year at AOFAS as he takes the helm. We will be in terrific hands, and in closing, I will say again, what a gift we have in the AOFAS. Thank you very much. It's been a tremendous honor. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. I have the distinct honor and privilege of introducing our next president, Brian Van Hurtog, and my job is just to give you a very brief idea of who he is and how he got there. Brian was born in 1959. Brian was born in 1959 in Sheldon, Iowa, a small town of around 5,000 people in the northwest corner of the state. His parents were Gene and Henrietta, and he was the middle child with two older and two younger sisters, Sheila, Sherry, Lori, and Heidi. On the right, you can see all four of them. On the left, Heidi was not yet born. Brian as an infant can be seen over here. He's got his sailor outfit on the right, which kind of, despite him being born in Iowa, kind of shows his love for the sea and his desire to get to water whenever he can. Brian is a very talented singer. He sung in high school and in college. He sung at his wedding and his son's wedding, and if he sings at special occasions, we may or may not get to hear him sing later today. We'll find out. This is Brian eating a cookie with his dog. This is him experimenting with different hairstyles as he matured. In high school, Brian was quite the athlete. He was a football player, basketball player, baseball player, ran track. He was in the theater, including roles in productions of Rigadoon and Camelot, and he sung in the swing choir. In the summers, he worked construction for his father and uncle's firm, and he earned enough money to buy a Chevy Nova, which was his kind of pride and joy in high school. Other than Nancy Roanhorse, his soulmate and love of his life, who he met in study hall during his junior year when she was a sophomore, and this is a picture of them at the junior prom. Brian subsequently went to Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, and Nancy followed him the following year. At Northwestern College, he was a defensive back on the football team, played a year of baseball, was in the a cappella choir, and actually his freshman year was voted as Mr. Irresistible, so you all know that. Brian is now a member of the Board of Trustees of his college. He's been for many years, and he's now the vice chair. Not many of us can say that, and in 2018, both him and Nancy were given distinguished service awards by the college. In 1981, he married Nancy with his father, Gene, as the best man. Subsequently went to medical school at the University of Iowa. Nancy did her senior year of college remotely and worked in the medical school dean's office to support them during those years. Subsequently did his residency at the University of Kansas, and this is him with his co-residents at graduation. During that time, they started their family. Jordan was born in 1986, Alice in 1987, and Taylor was born a few years later after they had finished. And this is Brian with Jordan. He subsequently had the privilege of doing his fellowship at the Medical College of Wisconsin with John Gould, Jeff Johnson, and Mike Sheriff. He initially started practice at Des Moines in 1991, and subsequently went to Rapid City, South Dakota, where he raised his family. Brian helped build his house there, helped his dad and uncle do that. They still have that property today, and also among things he did there was he was the defensive back coach for his son Jordan's Addison's high school football team. I subsequently moved to Des Moines for a few years and then St. Paul, Minnesota area, where he is currently practicing. With respect to Brian's academic achievements, he's a respected educator, researcher, and innovator. He has over 25 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been published. He's a renowned national and international speaker. He has over 30 orthopedic implant patents, and he's a developer of a well-known surgical education website. With respect to his service to the AOS, he's been on the board of directors as an at-large member from 2000 to 2008, and he's currently been president, vice president, and now president-elect. He was president of the foundation for three years. He was a representative to the AOS's Board of Specialty Societies for seven years, and he's served on the health policy, humanitarian, sports medicine, industrial relations, and practice management committees. Brian and his wife are true humanitarians. He's been on 13 medical missions to Haiti, including two months in medical school. He's done that through both orthopedics overseas and AOFIS, and he was actually in Haiti during 2010 when the earthquake happened, not just afterwards. He's done two medical missions to Venezuela, and he's been to Guatemala and Costa Rica with Hope Haven International Ministries wheelchair program. Here's a few pictures from Haiti of both Brian, and then Brian and Nancy in the middle, and then on the right is a house call, and the arrow is pointing to his son Taylor, who is now a PGY3 orthopedic resident at the University of Iowa. This is at Costa Rica, using his old construction skills to try to help build wheelchairs. Brian and Nancy have sponsored many children with financial support in Haiti. One of them is shown here, but most impressively is the story of Alexa. They first met her when she was a 15-year-old who was assigned to translate for them. They subsequently sponsored education at their alma mater, Northwestern College, had her go to get a nursing degree at Creighton, and now she's currently working as an RN, living in their house in Des Moines, and is getting ready to get married. Truly remarkable. Brian has lots of hobbies, boating, fishing. Even though he was in Iowa, they did have a place they went to in the summer on Lake Ocoboje, if I pronounced it right. He likes to ski, hike, golf, and you can see on the right with his sons Taylor and Addison. He likes to travel, he likes to watch football, and he likes to spend time with his family. This is Brian, his three sons, and his father, target shooting and also axe throwing, proving that he can be not just quiet, but also tough and carry a big axe. Brian and Nancy love to travel, they love to travel to beaches and the ocean, and here are a few pictures of them together. Likes spending time with friends and colleagues. There's Brian and Nancy with Chris and Linda Coetzee, and he's with Bob Anderson, Mark Meyerson, and Jeff Johnson. This is a picture of their 40th wedding anniversary, showing most of their family. On the far left is Jordan, next to him is his wife Allison, and in front of them their two daughters, Charlotte and Gilea. Behind Brian and Nancy is their son Addison, Alexis, the person I just talked about too, they've been sponsoring, and then their son Taylor, his wife Haley. Their children, Ben and Eleanor, and this picture, Laurel had not yet been born. This is just showing the five grandchildren, and so in summary, a lot of words you can use to describe Brian, he's a leader, he's humanitarian, he's an innovator, he's a hard worker, he's a man of faith, he's a family man, he's smart, and conscientious, and if you had to pick one word, he's just overall just solid. I have been fortunate to work with him the past few years, and we're all fortunate to have him as our president for the next year. Thank you very much. Thanks to everybody who stayed around for this last few sessions, but I just want to make a few comments. I'm very honored to be here. Mike, thanks for the kind introduction. I'll have a little bit more to say about you later, but let's see if I can get this thing to work. Here we go. One of the most valuable benefits of being involved in this society is developing close and lasting friendships with colleagues. Chris, this past year, you have demonstrated the qualities of a servant leader, always being prepared to ask good questions, listening to a wide spectrum of viewpoints, and then helping the board and others understand the decisions, the options before us. I believe this was key to making good, sometimes difficult decisions. Based on good information, you have set a high standard for those of us following in your footsteps. Thank you for your service. This year as president, I hope you allow me to lean on your wisdom in the year to come. My parents taught me that I should always leave things better than when I found them. This will be a hard charge to carry out after your presidency, so thank you. During my time, yes, thank you. During my time on the AOPS board, I had the opportunity to witness two other fine examples of superb leadership. Drs. McGarvey and Cohen, as we affectionately refer to them as our COVID presidents, were uniquely challenged to make major shifts in how we educate our membership and move swiftly into a mostly virtual world. There were logistical and financial challenges like our society has never seen before. Thank you for your wisdom and your perseverance during those difficult years. They are both leaving the board this year, and they will be missed. Let's give them a round of applause as well. We have an amazing AOPS board of directors, a wealth of backgrounds, talents, and passions. I assure you that all are dedicated to making decisions that serve to advance the society as a whole. Mike Aronoff will be my wingman this coming year. For all of you who just listened to Mike, you know he's very much a detailed person. That was one of the longest introductions I've ever seen. But I know he will keep me out of trouble, he will keep me realistic, and he will keep me grounded. So thank you, Mike, for the help that you're going to give me in the future. I want to thank the foundation board members for their dedication to building a strong financial foundation for the society and guiding our humanitarian efforts. This is hard work to find partners to fund our strategic initiatives, whether it's from industry, membership, or outside donors. This takes innovative thinking, planning, and execution. I particularly want to thank Eric Blumen for his leadership these past two years, and welcome Pete Mangone into that leadership position. I also want to recognize Joe Park and Mack Hogan for their fresh perspective on innovative approaches to raising support for our mission. No society, as Chris has said, can run by itself, and we need to recognize that our executive director, Elaine, and her incredibly talented staff were diligent behind the scenes to help us carry out our mission. They are the constant. As board members come and go, they are the source of significant institutional knowledge. And again, we already gave them a round of applause, but I want to thank all the staff for what they're going to do in the coming year. Yes, thank you. I also want to recognize the importance of our industry partners who share our core values and truly enable us to teach and equip our members to care for our patients. Without their involvement in meeting and innovation support, we could not carry out our mission. Please give them our appreciation by stopping by their exhibits and attending their breakout sessions at these meetings. What makes AOFA special are the relationship that we build together over the years, both personally and professionally. Much of who I am today is the sum of many of you who have shared your wisdom and friendship with me over the past 30-plus years. I had no idea when I started my orthopedic journey nearly 30-plus years ago that I would be so enriched by your lives. I truly wish I had more time and slides to acknowledge everyone who has blessed my life. The friendships we develop will always be our society's greatest strength, and I encourage those starting their professional journey to get involved. Be courageous and reach out to those more experienced and learn from them. Find opportunities to get near them and be part of their lives as well. People ask me what my agenda is for this coming year, and in reality, there is already an intricate structure in place built by my predecessors that require only adjustments for changing member needs. Let me briefly outline some of the priorities I see in the coming year. What could we do better as a society to meet these changing needs? My emphasis this year will be maximizing AOFAS membership value. This list is by no means all inclusive, but it touches on the topics of main focus. Let's start with education. We believe we are the world's leader in foot and ankle education. Knowledge is the power that allows us to best treat the patients we serve. Knowledge not only equips our members to be good diagnosticians, but technically proficient as surgeons if we are to deliver the best care for our patients. To maintain the leadership role in education, we need to adapt to changing needs by diversifying our content offerings to meet member needs with the right mixture of face to face, virtual, and on demand content. We also need to optimize the fellowship training experience and the AOFAS accreditation process will help ensure that our graduates are ready for the challenge our patients present. We need to continue to work to attract the best and brightest residents to the professionally satisfying specialty that we all enjoy and to fill all the fellowship programs. But more exposure early in the training of the residents needs to happen for them to understand what we have to offer. We have incredible content library that many members don't even know about. The web-based content includes CME podcasts, webinars, archived live meeting lectures, and technique tips. The on demand educational committee will be working to optimize the search engine and to socialize the content offerings and present these in different and more readily consumable formats. This will take a great deal of work, but is essential to adapt to how our membership looks for information. Even though we are the AOFAS, we are truly an international society. We acknowledge that we need an international perspective to find the best pathway to patient care. This is significant value in global effort to advance foot and ankle care. To facilitate that exchange, we need to continue to recognize and honor at our annual meetings guest nations who have significantly contributed to the body of foot and ankle knowledge, giving them the platform to advance our understanding as well. Our guest nation of this year has been a real amazing contribution to our program. Thank you to the British Foot and Ankle Society. We welcome, we will continue to build value with our international colleagues by financially supporting those who travel to teach us from abroad as they do us. Also under the direction of Chris Coetzee and Tom Lee, a speaker bureau will be assembled of seasoned and young and up and coming speakers to go at the request of international societies and participate in their annual meetings. Also in 2023, a new bi-directional exchange fellowship between AOFAS members and our European foot and ankle colleagues will enhance collaboration, build relationships, which are funded by respective societies. Application for this exchange will be available in the coming weeks. We can all agree that we have many unanswered questions about how to treat our patients. We need well-designed studies to make evidence-based treatment decisions. This brings value to our members and ultimately to our patients that we serve. What can we do to accelerate that process? We need a lot of answers. Let's fund good studies. Let's increase the $150,000 in grants that we are allocated from the AOFAS each year to possibly $200,000 to $300,000 a year, depending on how good the studies are that are submitted. We'll have to work hard through the foundation to find support for that initiative. We need to look for ways to make it less onerous also for members in smaller groups to collect data and expand our research efforts and make it more achievable. How can we continue to advocate for our members? Mike Aronow has championed our cause on a national level for years. He and our advocacy chair, David Thorderson, will continue to work with podiatry to find ways that we can work together on issues and agree upon, such as legislative changes in important issues as reimbursement, preauthorization, and provider safety. We, of course, will continue to disagree with them on scope of practice issues by the state. And Chris Chiodo has been a chair of the Health Policy Committee and with others have led that scope of practice legislative process at a state level. But we need grass supports from our members in those states to help write letters to convince the policymakers to do the right thing for our patients. We will work with the AMA's Truth in Advertising campaign to build awareness of the qualifications of practitioners that care for foot and ankle patients and develop a mechanism by which to combat false credential claims. In the scope of practice management, coding is king. But making your practice more efficient has become even more important with rising practice costs and decreasing reimbursement. We can benefit all members by leveraging the experience, the forms, the tools of our most efficient members, and improve the workflow in our offices and our ORs to cut time it takes to accomplish our daily tasks and services. We can equip our younger members how to decipher contracts, answer questions about employment options, and also market their practices by providing insightful webinars and printed content online, making these helpful tips readily available to our members. Again, we need to make our website more navigational and more helpful to our members. Many members continue to express concerns about how our society's leaders are selected and advanced, that we need to have more objectivity and transparency in that process. To do this requires an objective and subjective evaluation criteria for selection and advancement of our leaders, looking at skill sets, knowledge, engagement, and passion for the strategic initiative they are involved in. This process is there already, but perhaps we can make it more transparent. Committee board chairs will have to commit to this evaluation process, and the governance and nominating committees will have to be equally committed to use this criteria to make well-informed decisions regarding advancement. For those of our members who desire to lead, and we need to offer courses and webinars to refine the skills you possess and be more purposeful in mentoring you in our practices, committees, and our boards, we especially want to encourage those underrepresented groups in our society who want to take that leadership journey. Our AFIS board wants leadership to be inclusive. We enthusiastically welcome anyone, no matter what gender, race, orientation, worldview, to get involved in committees. Be court faculty at our meetings. Everyone will be evaluated by the same transparent standard. That is our pledge. In the end, our society needs motivated, qualified, effective leaders to advance our mission and core values. Protecting the integrity of our educational process is also important to us. We need to manage bias so that our members can get an accurate perspective on what treatments are most effective. Our new committee on outside interests is tasked to manage conflicts for AFIS leadership. Our AFIS staff has developed new platforms. They're actually not new, but we just haven't followed them before. But these platforms for speaker disclosure management to comply with ACCME guidelines for our CME courses. We know this is difficult. We know that we're all busy. But we will work on a realistic, compliant solution. COVID has put a pause in our humanitarian efforts. But this November, we're happy to say we are sending a team of orthopedic surgeons to Kenya. I personally know how rewarding this experience can be. Right now, we have far more members that want to do this type of service than opportunities. The humanitarian committee is under the guidance of Eric Gosin, and we will work to evaluate opportunities using a criteria we developed pre-COVID to make sure that service is fruitful and safe for our members. I want to acknowledge our committees that are really the lifeblood of our society. There is a robust structure of 15 committees and one subcommittee that provides energy, resources, and ideas, which is the pipeline on which the board makes decisions and carries out the mission. I encourage every member to consider to engage this way, especially if you're interested in the leadership pathway. It is our duty as a board of directors to clearly define those committee charges so that the results of their efforts are meaningful. One of the purposes of forming the foundation's endowment was to establish financial stability for the years to come. And we are aware that these funds need to be used to carry out the mission today as well. So as a need arises, such as research, we need to be very missional and fund that need. We want to reassure members that our goal as a board was not to just build a large endowment, but to sustain it long term, but also meet the current needs. We are grateful to our industry partners who have generously contributed to our educational events and scholarships. This all helps to make our strategic priorities financially possible, and it also enables us to keep our member registration fees reasonable. We will continue to look for ways to keep member expenses reasonable and not burdensome. This November in Chicago, 30 of our leaders, past and present, will identify long term aims and interests and how we can achieve those goals. We will address several headwinds that face our members and our society. We will commit to be results driven and to achieve these expected outcomes. We will define where we are, where we need to go, and how to get there. We will draft a strategy map and key performance indicators to track our progress. We will make this society better. Our society has a long history of being respectful and kind to one another. In my lifetime, I have not seen the country that I love be more polarized than it is today. I think it's important to realize that as a society, we don't have to always agree. But we always should value the input and perspective of others. Let's not forget our common goal. And that's our mission, is really to improve lives through exceptional orthopedic foot and ankle care. I want to make some acknowledgments. None of us can be in successful practice without a capable clinic team. They are the interface between us and our patients. And they have a significant influence on how our patients feel about the treatment that they are given. I want to thank my clinical team, Chris, Jerry, and Sophia, who make my clinical practice what it is today. To my mother and father, who instilled in me my values and my work ethic. They never wavered in their encouragement and their support of love. To my four lovely sisters, who are here today, thank you for your support and your encouragement over the years, and for sharing this week with Nancy and I. But I will still deny your claims that I was a spoiled child in the family. And to our three sons, Jordan, Addison, and Taylor, I am proud of the men you are. And I love that you still don't mind hanging out with me. Thank you. And to Alexa, our young lady from Haiti, who we invited to be part of our family six years ago. We are so glad you are part of our lives. And to my sweet five grandchildren, who restored my enthusiasm for the future. And last but not least, my wife of 41 years, Nancy, the most loving, graceful person that I've ever met. Thank you for your patience and your unconditional love. Your example and care is what keeps our family together. You are an amazing mother and Oma, with compassion and a giving heart. So in summary, I'm honored to lead the society in the coming year. I pledge to always look for ways to improve member value, ask good questions, and listen to good advice, especially lean on board and committee member wisdom, make good decisions based on that information, and help encourage, develop, and equip future leaders. And as Chris did last year, I want to give all of you my contact information. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or input. I want this to be transparent. Also, I want to remind you of our two upcoming meetings this year. Please join us for the winter meeting in Big Sky, Montana this coming January. It promises to be a very relaxed, but clinically and socially wonderful opportunity. Please register soon, as the rooms are limited. And mark your calendars for next year's annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. Becky Serrato and Ken Hunt will be our meeting chairs. And Korea will be our guest nation. Thank you very much. Thank you. to present to Christy Giovanni, our outgoing president, and probably the happiest man in this room right now, the lapel pin of a past president, and the gavel On behalf of a very grateful and lucky AOFAS, I want to congratulate you as our new AOFAS president and give you this official gavel that you can use at your discretion and offer you this beautiful AOFAS medallion that, you know, you were Mr. Irresistible once you put this on. If there's nothing that says you can't be Mr. Irresistible again. Thanks, everybody, for staying for this part. We very much appreciate that. And with that, I'm going to invite up, I think, Charlie Saltz. Place cleared out when I came up, place cleared out. I'm the editor of Foot & Ankle International and the other journal, which is Foot & Ankle Orthopedics that are journals of the American Orthopedic Foot & Ankle Society. I encourage all of you who are interested to let me know if you're interested in becoming a reviewer. It's an important function of the society and the goals of the journals is pretty simple, to improve care of patients worldwide. Simple, I'm just gonna go through for your information where we're at with each journal. We've got a great editorial board. It's a new board, it's turned over this year. Fantastic members of the board and I think quite diverse now and international and I'm really excited about that. We are the top rated in terms of impact factor of Foot & Ankle Journal at Foot & Ankle International. We continue to rise. This is really due to the previous administration and work of David Thordeson and this is a backwards sort of look at how the journal's doing. Acceptance rate sits around 15 to 20% so it's a competitive journal in all ways. We're pretty quick at getting the reviews done, about a month and you get your review, your decision done even sooner. First decision's 20 days, final decision in about a month so I think that's quite good in competitive for standards. We have videos and there are now nine for 22. These are incredible videos. There are five minutes or less and they relate to the specific article so if you read an article and you wanna understand what exactly that surgeons or surgeons did that they're reporting about, you just flip on the video and you can watch their surgery and you can decide whether you want it, if you think you're ready to try it on your own or you wanna go to the lab and try it and I think these are great resources for lots of reasons. We have podcasts. We have about 2,000 people who routinely listen to the podcasts and they're done once a month with the first article in the journal which usually is on a topic of general interest. We have a Twitter account that I wanna give credit to the Electronic Media Editorial Board. Glenn Chee, Adam Bitterman, Cesar DeCesa Netto, Lauren Gini has just joined it, Jonathan Kaplan, Itor Volcano. They're really making a big difference getting the word out about the articles that are written by the authors and the work done by our reviewers and there's a CME option for those who are interested in updating their knowledge and being tested on it and this is available through AOFAS. It's a CME exam and really give credit to this group of folks who are listed here. They write all the questions and it works autonomously. Foot and Ankle Orthopedics is our online journal just so everybody knows. It is now PubMed Central and Scopix index and we expect it to be fully indexed by all indices in the next year. Submissions and publications are way up now that it's indexed. We expect this year to publish about 90 papers in FAO. Now you might wonder why you might look at FAO versus FAI. I think FAI still is the high impact journal. FAO will soon become a higher and higher impact journal but if you look at downloads, there are more, your paper is more likely to be downloaded worldwide in FAO than almost any printed journal. 12,000 of Jim Brodsky's article, 12,000 this year have been downloaded of Jim Brodsky's article from 2020 to give you a sense and the highest downloaded FAI paper is 5,000 to give you some perspective on that. So there's a podcast series. This is done by the Young Physicians Committee and I wanna just take the last bit of my time which is only five minutes to discuss for those who are thinking of writing a paper or working on a research project, a couple of just thoughts I have about it. Before you do a study, do a literature review. Make sure it's a question that's not been answered and find out what everybody else has done. Then try to ask a question that can be answered. That's one of the main reasons we'll reject is the question could never have been answered. Is it a novel question? That's good. Is it confirmatory for new evidence? That would be great. Does it have clinical relevance? That would be great. So think about that. Then consult a statistician. This seems so obvious but it isn't necessarily the order in which people do it and it seems to me a lot of folks will then, after they get the reviews back, then talk to a statistician and they think somebody in their group can just sort of put it together. I think you talk to a statistician really about study design as much as anything at that point. You probably want to know what your minimally clinically important difference is if you're trying to power something. Figure out your sample size and that kind of thing. That's pretty straightforward and really doing all that's listed here up front will save you hundreds of hours of work and frustration and you won't be saying my name, bad things about me. And then review the guidelines before you start. And now the guidelines that we recommend that you use and we actually recommend it for both journals but we require for FAI are these guidelines and they're all part of the Equator Network. It's all online, easy to find. The most common study that we'll see is an observational study. You've done X number of something. You want to see how they're doing. You're going to go back and look at your records. You're going to call the patients in. You're going to try to document how they're doing. You maybe have a control group. That's an observational study. That's fine, that's what we publish mostly. And there are guidelines. The strobe guidelines, look carefully before you start a study at the methods section and see if you can just work your way down before you enter the first patient in to answer the questions on the guidelines before you start a study. And I think you'll find that the study will be stronger. It's much more likely to get accepted for publication and it'll actually have more impact on the field if you do it this way. So that's my advice. Thank you very much. Thank all the authors for all their work. Tremendous reviewers. We have amazing reviewers and their dedication is incredible and I really can't thank them enough and my co-editors who are tirelessly working on all this to make our field better. If you're interested in becoming a reviewer, I'll be around, just let me know and we'll give it a try and see how you like it. Thank you very much. Casey and Daniel to come up. We would like to announce the winners of the 2022 Roger A. Mann Award, the Jay Leonard Goldner Award, and the IFAS Awards. This year's program committee selected five finalists for the Roger Mann and five finalists for the Leonard Goldner Awards. Among those 10 papers, three of them were also considered for the IFAS Award for Excellence. I'm very pleased to make the following announcement, and we will ask the primary author to come to the stage when the papers are announced. For the Roger A. Mann Award for Outstanding Clinical Study. And so before we announce the award, we just want to say, first of all, all the nominees did amazing work. These were anonymously scored by the program committee, and that's how it was determined. But we want to thank all the participants in the research part of these studies. The winner of this year's Roger Mann Award is the Total Ankle versus Arthrodesis Randomized Control Trial. Congratulations, Andy Goldberg et al., for your amazing work. Please come up. Thank you. Next, we have the Leonard Goldner Award. There were amazing submissions for basic science. It's amazing to see such work done by teams of clinicians and basic scientists. And so, the one for the Outstanding Basic Science Study goes to. Passive Eversion Assessment for Progressive Collapsing Foot Deformity after Lateral Column Lengthening, a Cadaveric Biomechanical Study, lead author Jae-Yoon Kim. Thank you. And then the award for the International Federation and Financial Society's award for excellence. It's amazing that we have such amazing bridges. I know the first letter is American, but it's truly in an international world we live in. And so the award for best international paper goes to Thank you.
Video Summary
The video is a recording of a speech given at the annual AOFS meeting in Quebec City. The speaker, who is the outgoing president, reflects on his term and the accomplishments of the society. He highlights the importance of the collective effort and the impact that individuals can have on others. The speaker also discusses the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" and the advantages of diversity in a large organization. He mentions the need for continuous improvement and adaptation in order to meet the evolving needs of the members. The incoming president is then introduced, and his background is described in detail, including his personal life, education, and professional achievements. The speaker expresses confidence in the incoming president's ability to lead the society. The speech concludes with acknowledgments and thanks to various individuals and groups who have contributed to the success of the society, including board members, committee chairs, industry partners, and the staff. Finally, the speaker outlines his priorities for the coming year, which include maximizing membership value, advancing education, promoting research, advocating for members, improving practice management, and fostering leadership development. The video ends with the speaker inviting members to reach out to him and thanking everyone for their support.
Keywords
AOFS meeting
outgoing president
society accomplishments
collective effort
wisdom of crowds
diversity
continuous improvement
incoming president
priorities
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