One Platform for the Nation's Largest Academic Orthopaedic Community
The country's largest academic orthopaedic community had built something 4,000+ leaders relied on. We built the digital home worthy of it.
The opportunity
The Academic Orthopaedic Consortium (AOC) is, simply, the largest academic orthopaedic community in the United States — 4,000+ surgeon leaders and executives across 180+ university departments, spanning every orthopaedic subspecialty and including standing and former presidents of all major orthopaedic societies. For twenty years, AOC has been the place academic orthopaedics goes for the rapid gut check, the best-practice exchange, the mentorship connection, and the career move. That kind of gravitational pull is rare, and AOC had earned it.
A community operating at that scale generates its own momentum — and that momentum is exactly what created the opportunity. The original platform had served the community well and held everything members valued. But a national network this active, this senior, and this interconnected had grown past what a general-purpose membership tool was built to hold. A community of this stature deserved a digital home built specifically for it.
AOC wanted one purpose-built environment that could:
Let any member instantly find and reach any peer — by name, institution, role, or subspecialty — and message them directly
Bring members into specialty-focused groups matched to their position and interests
Put the full library of best practices, presentations, and benchmark insights one search away
Fold the nation's premier academic orthopaedic job marketplace, JobsInOrtho, directly into the member experience — no second login, no second platform
Make national mentorship and event participation effortless from a single dashboard
Reflect the AOC brand and the seriousness of its community at every touchpoint
What we built
We approached this the way we approach every engagement: operations first. Before touching a tool, we mapped everything AOC needed to run — how a chair finds a peer at another institution, how a resident discovers a fellowship, how a division chief joins the right subspecialty conversation, how the organization manages symposia and webinars — and then engineered the architecture to match, building on Softr over six months of custom development.
The result is a single connected platform at aocmembers.com where the entire community lives behind one login.
A national network, instantly searchable. Members discover and connect with peers across every subspecialty, institution, and leadership role — searching by name, institution, role, or specialty, then messaging colleagues directly for gut checks, best-practice sharing, or mentorship. The whole national network is one search away.
Specialty groups matched to each member's world. Dedicated spaces let members engage with the peers who share their exact challenges — from subspecialty innovation to departmental leadership strategy.
JobsInOrtho, fully integrated. The nation's premier academic orthopaedic job marketplace now lives inside the platform itself. Employers manage postings and company profiles from their dashboard with unlimited, recruiter-free access to the academic candidate pool; job seekers browse, save, and apply without ever leaving AOC Connect. One environment for the whole hiring cycle.
A resource hub built for retrieval. The full library of best practices, presentations, and strategic insights stays at members' fingertips — now far easier to search, filter, and pull exactly what they need.
National mentorship, made simple. The AOC National Advisor and Mentor Program is woven directly into the platform, so connecting experienced leaders with emerging professionals is seamless.
Event management in one place. Members register for symposia and webinars, access materials, and engage with content from a single personalized dashboard.
Because every element was custom-built for this community rather than bent out of an off-the-shelf product, the platform isn't a finished artifact — it's a foundation. As AOC's needs evolve and new capability ships, it goes to work immediately, with nothing to rip out and rebuild.
The new level
AOC now operates as one community in one place. The friction of switching platforms, hunting for a colleague's contact, or logging in twice to reach the job board is gone — and the energy that friction used to absorb goes back into what actually matters to AOC: the peer connections, the leadership development, and the national mission that have defined it for two decades.
The practical shift is everywhere in the day-to-day. A member can find the right peer and start a conversation in the time it used to take to remember where to look. A resident can move from a discussion thread to a fellowship posting without leaving the page. A chair can join a subspecialty group, pull a benchmark report, and register for the symposium in a single session. Discovery, connection, resources, jobs, mentorship, and events — once separate motions — are now one continuous experience.
What began as a beloved community platform became the connected digital home of the largest academic orthopaedic network in the country: one login, one community, built to grow for the next twenty years.