President's Message

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It is my pleasure to welcome you to the OTA Annual Meeting for the second consecutive year.  This anomaly is related to an organizational shift in the timing for transition of OTA held offices and positions from the Spring AAOS to the Fall OTA meeting.  When the OTA was established, some 30 years ago, there was no OTA Annual Meeting.  There was no OTA specific venue or opportunity for gathering, sharing, learning, educating, partnering, or doing OTA business.  Since 1985, our Annual Meeting has grown from nonexistent to the premier orthopaedic trauma related meeting in the World.

The timing shift for transition affected all committees.  The Program Committee was no exception.  Last year Mike McKee did double duty as the Program Committee Chair and Second President- Elect positions, and Mike Gardner entered as Co-Chair of the Program Committee.  Rather than following the normal two-year cycle in their Program Committee leadership duties, Mike McKee rotated off after one year to assume Presidential Line responsibilities, and Mike Gardner assumed the helm of the Program Committee a year early.  Stephen Kottmeier joined the Program Committee as Co-Chair.  Despite the disturbance in normal cadence, the 2018 OTA Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL, as you will see, represents an evolution toward a more robust, more comprehensive, and more modern Annual Meeting sure to be our best yet.  A testament to the commitment and dedication of all our member volunteers and the hard work of our OTA staff.  Thanks to all!!


Another exciting launch at this year’s Annual Meeting is OTA Online Trauma Access. I encourage you to take the time to visit www.OTAonline.org this week. OTA Online is a one-stop online portal for educational material related to orthopaedic trauma.  OTA Online will house the largest, most comprehensive, peer reviewed library of technique videos available.  The site will also include access to Rockwood & Green titles: Rockwood & Green Fractures in Adults/Children including a new living textbook edition Rockwood & Green Live that will provide consistent up-to-date material.  Be sure to watch for new content and timely updates coming soon including Rockwood & Green On-Call, a quick reference, bullet point resource based on the Rockwood & Green text, as well as an Orthopaedic Trauma Textbook Series (targeted monographs to the most relevant clinical issues). Finally, OTA Online will include Industry Channels where our corporate partners will showcase educational and reference content specific to their products. 

OTA Online will be open access through the end of December 2018. Beginning January 2019 the site will become an OTA member benefit requiring login. We are pleased to offer this new resource to our membership, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we continue to expand and enhance the site. For those who are not currently members, I invite you to join OTA and take advantage of this valuable new resource, as well as the many additional OTA member benefits. The next membership application deadline is November 1st.

I hope you will agree with our OTA Board of Directors that there is no better place or time than the OTA Annual Meeting to gather, share, learn, educate, partner, do OTA business, and now transition our offices and positions.  Enjoy the meeting and please visit OTA Online often and encourage colleagues and trainees to visit often as well.

William M. Ricci, MD