AO NORTH AMERICA NEWS

A Letter from Eric Johnson...

Dear Colleagues:

Welcome to the Spring 2000 AO North America News. This new issue gives me a great opportunity to wish all the AONA members a prosperous and healthy New Year. By now, we have been overwhelmed with educational courses touting what's new for the "next millennium." We all realize that our information base is now doubling in less than a year, and some of the educational events tying into the millennial theme may leave us a little underexposed for the new technological advances on the near horizon. I think we should be focusing on advances and changes over the next two to three years. The next millennium is a long time.

I read the other day about the technological era that we are currently living in. There has only been one other time in American history where America has been positioned to control vast amounts of new technology and the wealth obtained from this technology. This other time was at the turn of the last century. America had become a great industrial power controlling large amounts of steel production, developing petroleum products and advancing communications and electrical technologies. America is currently positioned to prosper for the next twenty to thirty years, as a result of our open economy and huge investments in high technology companies. Our practice of surgery and medicine is also at this same threshold. Advances over the next one or two decades will far outpace all the technology and sophistication we currently enjoy. As this technology becomes readily available, we should look for ways to take advantage of it and to incorporate it into the mission goals of AO North America.

Dr. Jeff Mast Ponders PowerPoint, as he works with his Apple laptop during the AONA Electronic Skills Workshop in Phoenix in January 2000

The Internet and the World Wide Web have taken off over the last five years, to be the omnipresent source of immediate information, data transfer, e-mail, and e-commerce. There are other aspects of this technology that most of us, who are not sophisticated visionaries, are unable to grasp as far as future potential is concerned. We are on the verge of instant image transfer, online consultation, distant learning, access to any and all information, immediate literature searches, and file transfers of overwhelming amounts of information at our fingertips. Computer-assisted surgery is now a reality and will increase in its influence as the years pass. Ten years ago, who would have thought that one could digitally photograph a radiograph, download it on a home PC and send it anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds? It is exciting and interesting to see the rapid advancement of computer technology changing the way we practice medicine and teach at AO courses, and improving our ability to learn and instruct physicians and operating room personnel.

For the past few years, AO North America has had a web site (www.aona.com), which is structured in a multimedia format, offering electronic course registration, course announcements, AONA information, fellowship applications, preceptorship applications, and subspecialty organization information. It also contains a multimedia library with streaming videos for basic orthopaedic traumatology, maxillofacial, spine and veterinary, which can be accessed at any time using a Real Player G2 viewer. We have also introduced a "Case of the Quarter" with text, radiographic and clinical images for each subspecialty, as a way for our AONA members to publish, on the Internet, techniques and concepts to manage difficult clinical problems. Our web site is receiving between 300,000 and 1.5 million hits a month and is constantly being upgraded and revised. This is one example of the potential for information transfer that will become more and more a part of our everyday lives over the next few years.

Please visit this site and alert residents in your specialty about the opportunities offered on our web site. With distant learning concepts, and streaming videos for understanding basic surgical technique and principles, the AONA web site should be an excellent source of information transfer and education.

In keeping with the idea of incorporating new technology into AO education and teaching, AO North America recently sponsored a course in Phoenix, Arizona, on "Electronic Presentation Skills." This course was developed to offer our teaching faculty a chance to get expert instruction on converting 35 mm slide presentations to PowerPoint programs, using laptop computers to improve both presentation and enhance electronic slide creation with the latest technology. The course lasted 2 1/2 days and was well received by the participants. Basic and advanced PowerPoint instruction was offered, combined with PhotoShop, Windows and Macintosh instruction and other image rendering software, along with subtleties of how to give an electronic presentation, technical errors, etc. At the end of this course, the participants were asked to give a presentation using the new techniques they learned at the course. For the course instructors this was a most enjoyable moment, observing the presentation skills learned. AO North America plans to have a second course this fall, offering both advanced and basic electronic skills instruction to members of AONA. We are moving into laptop presentations, video, and audio, and the potential for improving lectures will be realized over the next year. AO North America plans to develop computer-assisted learning at future AO courses, with access to archived videos, the internet, multimedia materials and instructional tapes.

We are in the millennial change this year and the potential for high technology information transfer and teaching has never been greater. AO North America will certainly be an active participant in this new technological era.

Sincerely,

Eric E. Johnson, M.D.