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University of Nebraska Medical Center

Collaboration is the Name of the Game for Sports Medicine

Doctor examining child sitting on table in doctor's office.

Kody Moffatt, MD, chief of the Division of Sports Medicine, likes to say, “Sports Medicine is a team sport.”

For him, it is not an empty cliché. His division relies on collaborations to provide specialized services to young athletes, while assisting other medical areas with its connections and expertise. Sports Medicine showcases what can be accomplished for patients and learners when strategic partnerships are maximized.

The Division of Sports Medicine collaborates with the Departments of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine on a non-operative sports medicine fellowship program housed in the Department of Family Medicine. The fellows in the program rotate through the Pediatric Sports Medicine Division, and faculty provide didactic lectures on the specific priorities and needs of young athletes.

For the Division of Pediatric Neurology and the Department of Orthopedics, Sports Medicine does the important work of taking some cases off their respective plates. “Neurology may come to mind first when parents think about concussions. However, we have expertise in concussion treatment and have quicker availability for appointments,” Dr. Moffatt explained. “This enables Neurology to focus on the patients we can’t help.” For Orthopedics, Sports Medicine reduces their patient load by seeing many of the non-surgical cases and doing the initial assessment and history for patients who eventually require surgery.

In addition to the patient benefits, learners rotating through Sports Medicine gain the valuable experience of understanding how the division interacts with and benefits other areas in medicine. “We realize that nearly all of the learners who come through our division will not be specializing in Sports Medicine,” Dr. Moffatt said. “We just want to make them aware of our perspective and processes to make them a more complete provider when they do treat young athletes.”