As an independent profession, the neuromonitoring (IONM) community frequently publishes evidence-based guidelines and standards that establish and maintain expectations for how IONM should be performed. Depending on individual preferences and practice patterns, spine surgeons take on various levels of responsibility for the supervision, interpretation and technical performance of IONM, often without knowing these guidelines and standards exist. Deviations from guidelines and standards on the part of the surgeon are often documented by the IONM team for their medicolegal protection, potentially increasing exposure for the surgeon. Additionally, hospital policies and procedures that constrain the practice of IONM can reduce patient safety and result in additional unanticipated medicolegal exposure. This session will address the most common questions the IONM Section gets from the NASS community. Faculty are experts in IONM guidelines and standards, clinical practice patterns and closed claims involving IONM and spine surgery. Attendees are encouraged to share their experiences and perspectives in what we expect will be a lively Q&A. This one-hour NASS 2021 pre-conference webinar is free for all members and nonmembers.

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Psychologically-Informed Practice can enhance guideline-based spine care and much attention has recently been placed on this topic. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded behavioral aspects related to spine care - for both patients and providers. This session is aimed at providing essential knowledge to help the spine provider make informed decisions about implementing Psychologically-Informed Practice for the management of patients with spinal pain disorders, with an emphasis on behavioral aspects related to delivering therapeutic exercise. This one-hour NASS 2021 pre-conference webinar is free for all members and nonmembers.

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Usage of bone morphogenetic protein has seen large fluctuations given the controversy regarding its safety profile. As reemergence of use continues to grow, it is important to evaluate the efficacy and safety of these applications. Additionally, small molecule and peptide alternatives to BMP2 are emerging, and critical analysis of their efficacy and safety is essential. This one-hour NASS 2021 pre-conference webinar is free for all members and nonmembers.

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Every day, lawmakers in Washington D.C. make decisions that perceptibly impact the delivery of patient care in the U.S. health system, often creating barriers and obstacles to creating healthy outcomes for patients. Because of this burden on the health provider, the volunteer spine-advocate has become a critical element to NASS’s public policy efforts. Yet, few NASS members understand the advocacy principles endemic to developing effective relationships with policymakers shaping their profession, and many are uncertain of how to begin working with elected officials who ultimately to serve and represent them.

The second webinar in the 2021 NASS Advocacy Quarterly Training Series, this session will demonstrate that there is no “one-size-fits-all” advocacy model. This training will provide nuanced strategies to spine advocates who seek to work with their elected officials and shape the future of spine care.

This webinar is designed to describe the intraoperative setup involved for performing robotic spine surgery and strategies to maximize efficiency.

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Every day, lawmakers in Washington D.C. make decisions that perceptibly impact the delivery of patient care in the U.S. health system, often creating barriers and obstacles to creating healthy outcomes for patients. Because of this burden on spine care physicians and practices, the volunteer spine-advocate has become a critical element to NASS’s public policy efforts. Yet, few NASS members understand the advocacy principles endemic to developing effective relationships with policymakers shaping their profession, and many are uncertain of how to begin working with elected officials who ultimately to serve and represent them. This webinar will provide NASS members with the building blocks necessary to serve as an effective spine-advocate to their Members of Congress and effectuate policy that promotes healthy patient outcomes.

This webinar will address the growing problem of physician burnout, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to recent data. The consequences of burnout impact both the individual physician as well as the health care system. The recognition of burnout as a serious individual and institutional challenge is leading to an increased need to design, implement, and evaluate systems that promote well-being and that makes strides to change the undeserved stigma associated with seeking help for burnout. In this webinar, recognized leaders discuss and present strategies to mitigate these risk factors in their own lives or in the organization that they represent.

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Nutrition plays an important role in health, wellness, and prevention and treatment of various disorders. Numerous factors and comorbidities are apparent in patients with spinal pain disorders that may be responsive to nutritional interventions, ranging from physiological processes (e.g. inflammation) to general health (e.g. obesity). However, specific information is largely unavailable to assist spine care practitioners with clinical decision-making processes for implementation of nutritional approaches for their patients. This symposium will discuss nutritional considerations for management of spinal pain disorders.

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Clinical decision-making and patient-centric spine care are significantly compromised by a single fundamental deficiency: the inability to “precisely” diagnosis most conditions. Delivering value-based, individualized care requires greater diagnostic precision and accuracy that in turn identifies predictably effective, standardized treatment for each individual. Those are qualities rarely found in spine care, yet employer and union purchasers, increasingly interested in value, now actively seek solutions that can assure that care delivery is appropriate, necessary, and effective.

This recorded webinar will focus on improving our conventional diagnostic methodologies. This will demand acknowledgment of spine care’s strong bias toward identifying anatomic pain sources that are often inaccurate and usually insufficient to direct predictably-effective, standardized treatments.

One means of making a precise diagnosis is to conduct a mechanical assessment that then identifies that the majority of painful spinal conditions are rapidly reversible. These clinical methods will be presented with many quality and cost implications across the broad spectrum of spine care.

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Although the ability to evaluate MRI studies is critical to the delivery of effective spine care, most spine specialists learn this skill in an informal fashion during training and in clinical practice. As a result, we may not have an understanding of the science and physics behind MR imaging and the various pulse sequences that are available for obtaining the scans. Many of us prefer to read our patients’ MR imaging studies ourselves rather than rely solely on the “official” radiologist’s report. We learn to make preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative decisions based on those readings. However, unlike radiologists who are trained to evaluate MRI studies in a systematic fashion, we may be more likely to evaluate the images in a less organized manner and to rely on our anatomic expertise and experience, which may not be the most effective method.

This online course teaches spine specialists how to systematically evaluate and interpret MR imaging studies of the spine. Although there are many courses that focus on MR imaging of the spine, this one is distinctive in that it is given by spine surgeons and radiologists specifically for spine specialists. As such, it is more clinically oriented than other courses. It also provides an excellent reference for radiologists and others such as physical medicine and rehabilitation clinicians, rheumatology physicians, and nonoperative musculoskeletal care specialists who evaluate MR images of the spine and who would like to gain a better appreciation of the associated clinical aspects.

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