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 the evaluation and diagnosis of proximal humerus fractures treated with reverse shoulder arthroplasty, with emphasis on fracture classification, imaging interpretation, and patient-specific risk factors. General principles for surgical selection in acute and chronic settings 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 
Nicholas Henry Maassen, MD, FAAOS

Learning Objectives

• Identify key fracture patterns, anatomic risk factors, and soft-tissue deficits that predict failed fixation or hemiarthroplasty in patients with a proximal humerus fracture.
• Perform a targeted clinical evaluation and interpret imaging studies to determine candidates for reverse shoulder arthroplasty in acute and chronic settings.
• Recognize diagnostic challenges that complicate reverse shoulder arthroplasty selection, including unreconstructable fracture patterns, tuberosity compromise, and neurologic dysfunction.
• Apply classification systems (Neer classification, Boileau classification) and bone quality metrics to support evidence-based treatment decisions.
• Differentiate indications and contraindications for reverse shoulder arthroplasty and formulate an appropriate surgical treatment plan based on patient-specific risk factors and functional goals.

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