CME expires July 31, 2028

Enhance your skills to increase accuracy in diagnosing musculoskeletal injuries and conditions.

Welcome to Diagnosis Spotlight, a comprehensive educational course geared for orthopaedic surgeons at all career stages. This course is designed to address a critical aspect of orthopaedic practice: enhancing the accuracy of diagnosis of musculoskeletal injuries and conditions. Each course focuses on the pearls and pitfalls for avoiding missed diagnoses and diagnostic errors, with an emphasis on mastering clinical evaluation, recognizing specific imaging findings, systematically evaluating differential diagnoses, and reviewing injury treatment strategies. Enhance your diagnostic skills with real-life case studies, expert insights, interactive learning activities, quizzes, and access to supplemental resources from the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, Orthopaedic Video Theater, and AAOS books.

In this Diagnosis Spotlight course, you will review indications for reverse shoulder arthroplasty in patients with chronic rotator cuff pathology, focusing on clinical assessment, radiographic interpretation, and accurate diagnosis. General strategies for the management of chronic rotator cuff pathology also are discussed.

As an additional resource, this course includes the Revised Safer Dx Instrument, a tool developed by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine to help identify potential diagnostic errors and guide safety improvement efforts that prevent future errors. The instrument assesses various aspects of a primary care encounter for breakdowns in the diagnostic process, and its use can help standardize the detection of diagnostic errors in primary care.

Editors 
Umasuthan Srikumaran, MD, MBA, FAAOS

Learning Objectives

• List clinical conditions that mimic chronic rotator cuff pathology and explain why candidacy for reverse total shoulder arthroplasty often is overlooked during early evaluation.
• Describe the pathophysiology, biomechanical disruption, and natural history of massive irreparable rotator cuff tears and rotator cuff tear arthropathy.
• Review best practices for the clinical evaluation and interpretation of rotator cuff-specific physical examination findings.
• Interpret diagnostic imaging studies via classification systems to support surgical planning for reverse total shoulder arthroplasty.
• Summarize the indications, expected outcomes, and complications associated with reverse total shoulder arthroplasty in patients with chronic rotator cuff deficiency.

Earn up to 5 AMA PRA Category 1 CME credits™.