To help attendees narrow their choices and plan their time, the educational sessions at AOPA are broken into tracks: digital care, business education, clinical care, pedorthic education, and technical fabrication. With so many great choices, the editors at The O&P EDGE narrowed down a few for your consideration.
Digital Care
- There’s a themed grouping in digital care called “It’s All About the Data” on Friday morning where three presentations continue to bring data to the forefront of O&P. One of the sessions, “Insights into Transtibial Prosthetic Socket Design from Expert UK Clinicians’ Digital Records,” is the winner of the 2024 Hans Georg Näder Digital Education Award.
- The other sessions, “Digital Health: Remote Visits and Modular Design in a Myoelectric Hand,” and “Revolutionizing Prosthetic Care: Smartphone Gait Data for Practical Evidence and Benchmarking,” discuss how remote appointments are enhancing patient care and accessibility and how a smartphone can give practitioners new insights about their patients.
Business
- In the session called “Improve Your Business, Learn How to Use the O&P Profession’s Benchmarking Data,” the presenters describe how to collect financial data and improve profitability. One of the presenters, Scott Williamson, writes a business column in the our Sifted newsletter each month.
O&P Clinical Care
- “Initial Insights from the Limb Loss and Preservation Registry” shares what has been discovered within the registry, including a finding that people with lower-limb loss have the same levels of mobility as people receiving knee replacement surgery yet experience more payer pushback. That kind of information found in the data will make a big difference to O&P patients.
- “Delving into the Importance of Outcome Measures and Remote Monitoring in Lower-Limb Prosthetic Rehabilitation: Insights from an Online Survey” talks about real-world activity monitoring.
- “Modern Patient Preference Technologies to Drive Patient Outcomes Within Prosthetic Choice” has a panel of experts discussing ways to understand how people weigh the benefits and risks in their prosthetic limb choices.
Pedorthic
A couple of sessions in the pedorthic arena offer suggestions about decision-making from the practitioner’s point of view.
- “Filling the Pedorthic Prescription: How to Decide What Orthosis to Use,” establishes best practices that incorporate all the challenges in patient care.
- “12 Tips to Successfully Dispense Foot Orthotics” with Séamus Kennedy offers ideas to bring efficiency to the process.
Technical Fabrication
With advances in material science, presentations in this track drill down into making O&P devices even better.
- “Maximizing the Tuning of Ankle Foot Orthoses with the Material Science of Custom Fabrication” shares ways to optimize thermoplastic fabrication.
- “How to Properly Use Two-part Structural Adhesives in the Manufacturing of Prosthetic and Orthotic Devices and Their Fitting” covers handling, surface preparation, and best practices.
