Lessons in Orthopaedic Leadership: An AOA Podcast

Social media is already shaping orthopaedic surgery, but the real question is how to use it without turning your professional life into a performance. We sit down with Dr. Mary Mulcahey, Chief of Sports Medicine at Loyola University Medical Center, to talk about what actually works for physicians who want to learn, connect, and lead in a fast-moving digital world. Her approach is refreshingly simple: focus on using platforms as tools for education, community, and professional development.

We also get into why she launched her own medical leadership podcast, Lead Change, after realizing there was a gap in content about leadership in medicine and strategic career transitions. Getting the first job is one thing. Moving from clinician to leader, taking on administration, or stepping into department and hospital leadership is another. Dr. Mulcahey shares how conversations with physicians, coaches, and authors can turn into practical lessons you can apply in your own practice, team, and training program.

If you’ve ever wondered how a busy surgeon keeps a consistent podcast cadence, we unpack the behind-the-scenes work: recruiting guests, scheduling, editing, and creating social media snippets that meet people where they are. We also talk platforms, including why Instagram can be such a strong fit for orthopaedic surgeons, how to start by observing before posting, and why social media should never feel stressful or controversial.

Subscribe for more conversations on the future of orthopedic surgery, share this with a colleague who’s hesitant about social media, and leave a review.

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?

The next wave in orthopaedic surgery isn’t just surgical technique it’s how care gets organized, measured, and paid for. We sit down with Dr. Aaron Chamberlain, senior medical director for Intermountain’s musculoskeletal clinical program, to unpack why vertically integrated healthcare systems can be a powerful engine for value-based care and what that means for surgeons who want to lead, not just react.

We talk candidly about “risk” and why taking on financial accountability can actually unlock better medicine: clearer incentives, tighter alignment with payers, and a sharper focus on outcomes across the full episode of care. Aaron shares how Intermountain uses deep data infrastructure, enterprise dashboards, and careful patient cohorting to reduce unwarranted variation and make cost and quality visible to clinicians. If you’ve ever wondered how an Epic-era analytics platform can change real-world practice patterns, you’ll hear the nuts and bolts.

You’ll also get a concrete care redesign example: shifting appropriate hand procedures from the hospital or surgery center into the clinic, then using shared savings to reward the extra work required to make the change safe and scalable. We connect that playbook to broader trends like bundled payments and the CMS TEAM model, and we close with leadership lessons that translate anywhere: keep physicians involved, stay close to the bedside, and “fall in love with the problem” before you pitch a solution.

If you found this useful, subscribe to the AOA Lessons in Leadership Podcast series, share the episode with a colleague, and leave a review with the value-based care question you’re wrestling with right now.