CHOP Research Featured Prominently at Major Orthopaedics Meeting

Most members from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Division of Orthopaedics recently presented several key studies at the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America (POSNA) Annual Meeting, which was held in May in Austin, Texas. POSNA is made up of more than 1,200 pediatric orthopaedic surgeons and other medical professionals dedicated to children's musculoskeletal health.

More than 800 scientific abstracts were submitted for inclusion in 2018, and CHOP's papers and thought leaders were prominently featured throughout the course of the meeting.

John M. Flynn, MD "This year, the POSNA meeting showcased CHOP's huge contribution to the field of pediatric orthopaedics," said Dr. Flynn, Chief of the Division of Orthopaedics. "It also gave us the opportunity to feature the many rising stars who are poised to take the lead in the field in the years ahead."

Two papers from CHOP's team were selected in the Best Clinical Paper section of the meeting.

Dr. Apurva Shah's paper focused on opioid use after supracondylar fractures. Shah and his colleagues found that patients reported using less than 25 percent of prescribed opioid medication, suggesting that these drugs may have been overprescribed for these types of injuries.

Dr. Flynn and his colleagues showed that creating a dedicated team and standardizing their approach to posterior spinal fusion for scoliosis achieved a large reduction in the time spent in the operating room, even routinely completing two such procedures with the same team without exceeding the standard block time.

Additionally, Dr. Flynn and former CHOP Benjamin Fox Orthopaedic Research Scholar Award fellow Taylor Jackson shared the distinction of Best Quality Safety Value Paper at the meeting. They demonstrated that a simple change in hand positioning for low-dose stereoradiography allows clinicians to simultaneously assess spinal deformity and skeletal maturity, saving time and money while exposing the child to less radiation.

Dr. Wudbhav N. Sankar, Director of the Young Adult Hip Preservation Program, was the pre-course chair. His course about the value of data on which orthopaedic surgeons base their research touched on several controversies in the treatment of sports-related injuries, spine and limb deformities and other areas of interest.

A special session dedicated to evidence-based medicine was led by Dr. Theodore Ganley, Director of CHOP’s Sports Medicine and Performance Center, and other CHOP experts were featured as speakers and moderators throughout the meeting.

In an effort to develop consensus-based guidelines for atlanto-axial instability in children with Down syndrome, Dr. Patrick Cahill and Benjamin Fox Orthopaedic Research Scholar Award fellow Jigar Gandhi held a multidisciplinary session at POSNA. Several leading experts in the field including orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, emergency medicine physicians and physician assistants participated in repeated rounds of voting for determining consensus through the modified-Delphi method. This particular method has been utilized successfully in healthcare setting as a reliable means of building consensus for a clinical problem when there is little or no definitive evidence is available on the topic.