AAOS 2027: March 3-6, Las Vegas
The AAOS Annual Meeting runs March 3-6, 2027 at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center in Las Vegas. AAOS has moved it to Wednesday through Saturday and says Instructional Course Lectures are included with registration rather than priced separately. Sorso is not an exhibitor, sponsor, or speaker at this event. This is an independent prep guide for orthopaedic practice owners.
The CFO read
Orthopaedic owners tend to know their case volume cold and their case economics vaguely. The number that matters is contribution per case after implants, and in most practices we see it varies enough between procedures that the schedule itself is a financial decision nobody is making deliberately. Before Las Vegas, price your top ten procedures net of device cost. If two of them are underwater, you want to find that out from your own spreadsheet rather than from a buyer's diligence.
— Stanislav Sukhinin, CFA · Founder, Sorso
Why this matters for your bottom line
Orthopaedics has the widest gap in outpatient medicine between what a case bills and what it nets, because implant and device cost sits inside the case rather than beside it. Owners who track revenue per case without tracking implant cost per case are watching half the equation.
The migration of joints and spine to the outpatient setting keeps moving where the money is made. Whether you own a share of the ASC, take a facility fee, or send cases to someone else's site is usually the single largest financial decision an orthopaedic owner makes.
Ancillaries carry orthopaedic practices: imaging, physical therapy, and DME each have their own margin profile and their own compliance exposure. Most groups cannot say which of the three actually contributes.
Private equity consolidation in orthopaedics is active enough that valuation conversations arrive unprompted. Knowing your adjusted EBITDA before a broker tells you theirs changes how that call goes.
What to look for
Practice management sessions on ASC economics, syndication structures, and facility-fee arrangements
Implant and device cost containment, including vendor consolidation and negotiated pricing tiers
Site-of-service shift sessions covering which cases are moving outpatient and what that does to professional fees
Ancillary line economics: in-office imaging, physical therapy, and DME dispensing
Coding and documentation for global surgical packages and post-operative visits
Consolidation and valuation trends across orthopaedic groups
Financial prep checklist
Review these before you go.
Pull implant and device cost as a percentage of case revenue for your top ten procedures
Separate professional fee revenue from facility revenue for every case done at an ASC you hold a stake in
Run contribution margin on each ancillary line rather than gross revenue: imaging, therapy, and DME
Check which payer contracts reimburse below your fully loaded cost per case, implants included
Confirm your global surgical package billing against post-operative visits actually delivered
Calculate adjusted EBITDA with owner compensation normalised, before anyone else does it for you
What it costs to send someone
Registration is the line everyone budgets first. It is rarely the one that decides whether the trip was worth it.
Registration
AAOS has published the dates, the venue, and the change that Instructional Course Lectures are included with registration. It has not published 2027 rates, so the only honest budget line is what your practice paid last time plus whatever the ICL change does to it.
Coverage and lost production
Wednesday to Saturday takes three clinic days and a surgery day rather than a weekend. For an operating surgeon that is the expensive part: cases do not move to next week without pushing everything behind them. Price the displaced OR time before the airfare.
Who else travels
Ortho groups rarely send one surgeon. Add partners, the administrator, and anyone from the ASC side, and both the travel bill and the uncovered clinical days multiply.
What comes back as a deduction
IRS Publication 463 allows the travel deduction for a convention where “your attendance benefits your trade or business,” on the ordinary rules for travel away from home. Meals are generally limited to 50% of the unreimbursed cost. Keep the agenda with the receipts, and confirm the treatment with whoever signs your return.
No rates are quoted here. The organizer had published none when we last checked this page against their site on 10 August 2026, and travel is yours to price for your own dates anyway. The point of the list is that the two lines owners leave out, coverage and headcount, are the ones that decide the real number.
Before AAOS 2027 Annual Meeting, get your own numbers straight
Walk in able to check every benchmark on the slides against your own numbers. Three ways owners start with us:
Fractional CFO
Strategic CFO for $3M–$50M clinics
Forecasts, location-level P&L, and exit prep. Starts at $4,000/mo.
Explore Fractional CFO →Accounting
Healthcare-specialist accounting
Books done right by people who understand clinic finance. Starts at $2,000/mo.
Explore Accounting →Free Assessment
A financial checkup before you go
Four minutes. See where your practice stands so every session is measured against your own numbers.
Take the assessment →Going to AAOS 2027 Annual Meeting?
Tell us, and we will look at coming to meet you.
Stan does not have a ticket booked for this one yet. If enough clinic owners want to sit down there, that is what decides it. Register interest and we will confirm either way well before the dates — no obligation, and we will not add you to a mailing list.
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Founder of Sorso and a CFA charterholder. Before Sorso, Stan spent 19 years in corporate finance at institutions including UniCredit and Société Générale — managing a $450M loan portfolio and making senior partner at a major mezzanine lender by 29 — then built a fractional CFO firm exclusively for outpatient healthcare clinics.