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Paving a new path: Kristy Weber, MD, becomes AAOS president
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At the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Annual Meeting, Kristy L. Weber, MD, became the first female president of the organization’s board of directors, marking the third year of a 4-year term of volunteer service after serving as vice president of the AAOS for the previous 2 years.
“I was told that women couldn’t get into orthopedics when considering several different subspecialties in medical school during the late 80s,” Weber said in a press release. “You can bet that’s all I needed to hear to solidify my choice, and I am proud to be a woman in a profession that is currently 94% male. While my gender does not define me, I know that reducing barriers and embracing gender, ethnic and racial diversity in our field only stands to better our culture and better serve patients. By incorporating our unique experiences and perspectives, we can care for a more diverse patient population. Our field is the least diverse of all medical specialties and by maintaining this status quo, we risk losing talented medical professionals who could make significant advancements in orthopedics.”
The chief of orthopedic oncology in the department of orthopedic surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Sarcoma Program in Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center, Weber specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of adults, adolescents and children with bone and soft tissue tumors. She also focuses on complex limb salvage techniques around the hip, knee, shoulder and pelvis. In an interview with Healio.com/Orthopedics, Weber spoke about her new role a president and the goals she hopes to achieve. – by Casey Tingle
How does it feel to be named the first female president of the AAOS Board of Directors?
I consider it an incredible honor. There have been many women who have paved the way for women in the field before me. I stand on their shoulders and represent them in this role. I’m looking forward to being a role model for women to come and I want women to know that it’s possible to be in a leadership [role] as a woman, even when we’re only 6% of the field.
Does your presidency have a theme or an overarching goal?
The role of the president and the leadership of the board should be to lead in executing the strategic plan for the organization. Whatever the organization has chosen as the key areas of focus, we need to be able to continue to move forward on those goals rather than jump to the side and do personal pet projects and things like that. Going forward, my goal is to execute on the strategic plan that we just approved in December of last year. It’s a bold plan. We’ve got three main goals, a new vision and we’re going to start working on some of the metrics and strategic objectives that underline those goals so that we can be successful in areas where we feel like we need to make progress in the next 5 years.
What would you say may be your first plan of action?
Well, there are many things that go on simultaneously, but one of the things that we’re starting with right away, and we’ve already actually started with a project team, is to redefine the academy’s core values which is part of goal three. So, core values fit in with the strategic plan. We have prior core values that we feel need to be upgraded. I think core values help define the culture of the organization, so the board is going to do some work on digging in to where our culture is now, where we want it to be and redefining what core values set the academy apart from other organizations. Then, we want to live into those values and use those to guide us in how we make decisions and how we behave.
The first goal is about delivering a personalized and seamless member experience. We don’t communicate the way people want to be communicated to these days, especially younger members. They want what they want, when they want it, personalized to them. They don’t want to get an email about a hand surgery educational offering when they’re a trauma surgeon. Maybe they want to be texted about whatever is going to be relevant to their practice. For us to be able to do that, we have to be able to know who our members are and have the data to know that, for instance, I am a tumor surgeon that’s 20 years into my career and I’m interested in these three things: I’m interested in leadership; I’m interested in diversity; I’m interested in tumor surgery. Then when the academy has products or courses or webinars that would be relevant to my interests, they push those out to me in a way that I want to receive the information. That’s where we’re going.
How do you plan on implementing the first goal?
The first step is investing in the technology. The board just authorized $2.1 million in December for us to upgrade a lot of the technology we have so we can continue moving into the digital arena. Believe it or not, we don’t even have all the data to categorize members by their particular subspecialty. We don’t have complete records on all the academy members. How can we communicate if we don’t know who does hip surgery, who does trauma surgery, who identifies as a racial minority and who identifies as a woman? If we can’t communicate with our members and we can’t provide them what they need, why would they maintain their membership?
We don’t want to be irrelevant, we want to be the hub of information, the real key to people’s experience in orthopedics. We want members to access the academy for everything. We want to be able to provide what people will need whether they’re in a private solo practice in Kansas vs. an employed group in California or an academic institution. We want to be able to tailor the experience and the offerings to different people at different stages in their career and different practice settings.
Who would you say has helped influence your career as an orthopedic surgeon and as an academic?
For many people, some of their role models come from their training program. Two of the people in my training program at the University of Iowa were Stuart L. Weinstein, MD, and Jody Buckwalter, MD. Those two faculty members were instrumental in my career. Not only were they outstanding educators, but they were huge supporters of all types of people. They were each such emotionally intelligent, brilliant men, great doctors and people who you wanted to work hard for, and they’ve stayed my mentors and became my friends over the course of my career. I still talk to them about career issues or advice. They believed in me early on, and I couldn’t have had better early role models.
I’m a tumor surgeon, so my main role model for what I do day to day in my career is Frank H. Sim, MD, at the Mayo Clinic. He was the main mentor for me to learn how to do what I do, a master surgeon and exceptional ambassador for the field.
The last one is Michael Goldberg, MD. He’s been championing the idea of quality and evidence-based orthopedics for many years, especially when it wasn’t very popular. People are starting to come around to the idea that quality and value are the environment that’s here to stay. U.S. health care is going to be a value-based system and we’re going to have to be able to justify what we do with as much evidence as possible to be able to say what works and what doesn’t for patients. Michael has been espousing these concepts throughout his career, really an early prophet in that regard, and he’s taught me so much of what I know about the research and quality area in orthopedics.
I never thought [these mentors] treated me different because I was a woman. They treated me like everybody else and were incredibly respectful.
What may your new role mean for the future of women in leadership roles within orthopedics?
I hope that it inspires others to continue to move up the organizational ladders of leadership. The one thing that would disappoint me greatly is that if I’m academy’s first and last woman president. We have to have a sustainable pipeline of qualified women to lead the organization in the future. There should be no barriers to qualified leaders no matter what they look like. Women have certainly been in leadership roles in other orthopedic organizations for several years. The more there are, the more common it’s going to seem and the more achievable it’s going to be for young women.