Heather Vallier
Heather A. Vallier is an American orthopaedic surgeon at Cleveland Clinic and was the 36th president of the Orthopaedic Trauma Association and the first ever female president. She is known for developing early appropriate care, the resuscitation criteria now used globally to determine when polytraumatized patients are optimized for orthopaedic trauma surgical intervention.
Education
She completed undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in 1989. She later graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine.Vallier subsequently completed an orthopaedic surgery residency at the University of Wisconsin. She later followed by a fellowship in orthopaedic traumatology at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington.
Career
Vallier worked at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland as the Clyde L. Nash, MD Jr. Professor of Orthopaedic Education, prior to being recruited to the Cleveland Clinic in 2024.Research
Early Appropriate Care
Vallier developed the concept of Early Appropriate Care, which re-defined Orthopaedic trauma resuscitation guidelines globally by determining when delayed definitive fixation for pelvis, femur, acetabulum, and spine fractures was indicated, and when polytraumatized patients were physiologically optimized for surgery.Other research
In a highly cited article published in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS), Vallier demonstrated the time operative intervention for talar neck fractures does not impact the subsequent development of osteonecrosis. Instead, her findings showed the degree of displacement is what impacts osteonecrosis rates, impacting the management of talar neck fractures.She has acted as the Steering Committee member of the Multicenter Extremity Trauma Research Consortium since 2010 at MetroHealth, a network of 22 core level I civilian trauma centers and 4 core military treatment centers. This collaboration resulted in the PREVENT CLOT trial, demonstrating thromboprophylaxis with aspirin was noninferior to low-molecular-weight heparin for patients with extremity fractures, published in The ''New England Journal of Medicine'' in 2023. She was an investigator in the "Study to prospectively evaluate reamed intramedullary nails in tibial shaft fractures" trial, which demonstrated reamed intramedullary tibial nails are superior to unreamed nails for closed fractures, but no different for open fractures.
Vallier's research has been funded by the US Department of Defense and NIH. Vallier has a H-index of 42.