Lessons in Orthopaedic Leadership: An AOA Podcast

Some of the most important leadership moves in orthopaedic surgery don’t start with ambition, they start with a moment of need. Dr. Lundy sits down with Dr. Kevin Black, MD, FAOA to unpack how a busy sports medicine surgeon at Penn State evolves into an orthopaedic department chair, then steps into rare territory as interim dean and later interim vice dean for education.

We talk candidly about the leadership transition from clinician to chair, and why the skill set is fundamentally different from technical excellence. Kevin lays out what he sees as the non-negotiables for physician leadership in academic medicine: integrity, trust, and a servant-leader mindset shaped by mentors and life experience. He also shares the real-world logistics behind the title, including how he gradually cut back clinical time, what it takes to stay credible with colleagues, and the uncomfortable but necessary decision to stop operating when volume drops and standards matter most.

From there, the lens widens. The jump from department chair to medical school dean brings new reporting lines, board relationships, and institution-wide responsibility for education and research, all while navigating unrest, COVID-era financial pressures, and shifting expectations. Kevin also tells the story of a high-stakes LCME reaccreditation push: nine months, a massive submission, and a team effort that demanded everything he’d learned about leading under pressure.

If you care about orthopedic surgery leadership, physician executives, healthcare administration, or the future of academic medicine, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review.

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?