Shriners Children’s Portland hosted the 2024 Shriners Children’s Sports Consortium this fall, bringing together a group of sports-focused pediatric orthopedic specialists to discuss sports medicine care and research at Shriners Children’s. Multidisciplinary conversations centered around active research projects, sports patient-reported outcomes, motion analysis center studies, rehabilitation, education and more.
Kyle Watterson, Ph.D., corporate director of rehabilitation, therapy services, kicks off the meeting in Portland.
Attendees included staff from 12 hospitals and clinics — representing Shriners Children’s Canada, Chicago, Erie, Greenville, Hawai‘i, Lexington, Northern California, Southern California, Philadelphia, Portland, Spokane and Shreveport, plus the healthcare system’s headquarters, which is in Tampa, Florida.
Jeremy Bauer, M.D., Shriners Children’s Portland orthopedic surgeon and chair of the Sports Consortium group, called the meeting an inspiration. “It was an incredible opportunity to collaborate with a multidisciplinary group across our system,” said Dr. Bauer. “We developed projects to help educate patients and community providers as well as research proposals that help us better evaluate return-tosports readiness for more children beyond the walls of Shriners Children’s locations.”
This group, founded in 2019 by research-focused Shriners Children’s medical professionals, allows incredible collaborations across the healthcare system to further research and sports medicine best practices.
The consortium was made possible by the generosity of the William E. and Thelma F. Housman Foundation.
