This past Saturday evening in San Diego, a group of forward-thinking shoulder surgeons, thought leaders, and industry suppliers gathered for the 6th annual Codman Shoulder Society meeting. Dr. JP Warner founded the Codman Shoulder Society in 2014 in honor of Dr. Ernest Codman. The group is dedicated to advancing shoulder care through better care measurement, learning, and innovation.

The theme of this year’s meeting was measuring to improve outcomes and care, and I was invited to co-moderate. Harvard Business School Professor, Bob Kaplan, began by describing the wide variation in outcomes and costs that we see today across patients. He then gave an overview of how to think about organizing care team’s around the patient’s medical condition, what types of outcomes to measure, how to measure true care costs using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing, and then why it was important to shift from fee-for-service to bundled payments to improve care value. Professor Kaplan also presented innovative work by Avant-garde to normalize for differences in rotator cuff tear size when comparing costs across surgeons.

Following Professor Kaplan, Dr. Andy Jawa from New England Baptist Hospital delivered a presentation titled, “The Cost and Value of Shoulder Arthroplasty: A Collaboration with Avant-garde Health.” He used Avant-garde’s data to explain the drivers of cost for shoulder arthroplasty and how these costs compare to hip, knee, elbow, and ankle arthroplasty. He then used Avant-garde’s data to show in a standardized way how costs for shoulder arthroplasty vary across institutions before concluding with how the data has enabled the Baptist to significantly improve the value of its care.

Afterwards, Jimmy May, a Marine, presented how the Marines have approached adopting disruptive innovations, and how they train their officers to be better leaders and create the conditions for innovations that may or may not work. Then following dinner there were a series of research presentations around new technologies related to shoulder care, such as virtual procedure planning and surgical training.

The group left excited to continue to learn from one another and collectively improve their care.