Executive Vice President & CEO’s Message
It has been a very busy six months. It was great to meet so many of you at our Summit and Spring Meeting. We had a very successful spring Summit on the Future of Clinical Registries. At our Spring Meeting, we brought all of our component group chairs together to begin more shared learning and collaboration. Dr. Hoyt facilitated a strategic planning session for our society CEOs on possible future directions for CMSS gathered from my CEO interviews. We are getting closer to a new vision for CMSS that we hope will provide greater value for your society and maximize our collective contributions to healthcare quality and physician education. We are looking forward to the Board’s strategic planning retreat in August. We will seek your input on the new CMSS draft mission and strategic plan in the fall.
Fall Summit and Annual Meeting. Please save the date for the CMSS Summit and Annual Meeting on November 15-16 in Arlington, VA. Building on the success of our Registry Summit, CMSS will now turn our attention to The Future of Physician Learning and Improvement. To drive meaningful improvement in our rapidly changing healthcare system, education and learning should evolve to meet physician needs. We need to translate innovative approaches into ongoing learning and improvement, including new technology and digital strategies that have the potential to transform how education is delivered and how care is assessed, delivered and improved. Building on our registry work, we will also explore how to use performance data from registries to support improvement. We are assembling an advisory committee and welcome your suggestions. Based on feedback, we have eliminated the Saturday morning session of our meeting, which has been poorly attended and will incorporate a business meeting into the Annual Meeting on November 16. Meeting registration will open soon.
CMSS Members. We are pleased to welcome the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) back to CMSS!
Component Groups. We are pleased to co-convene the Physician EHR Coalition (PEHRC) with the Health Information Management System Society (HIMSS). PEHRC currently includes more than 20 specialty societies focused on ways to improve usability and interoperability of EHRs. Please let me know if your society would be interested in joining PEHRC. Membership is free. We are also pleased to announce a new Component Group for Managing Editors of society-sponsored journals. We have had a great response from member societies and will launch the group soon. Please let me know if your managing editor would like to participate. We are also working with all our component group chairs to provide more structure and infrastructure support for their important work.
Continuing Board Certification. I am closely tracking the work of the Commission on the Future of Continuing Board Certification. I also have monthly meetings with ABMS leadership. Read the summary of the public testimony from the last two commission meetings. I will be attending the next meeting on August 29-30 in Chicago. A draft Commission report is expected in November 2018 with final report to ABMS in February 2019.
National Academy of Medicine Opioid Collaborative. CMSS has been invited to join the steering committee of this new two-year NAM collaborative. At the first meeting of the steering committee on July 27, we will prioritize workstreams for the initiative, including education and training, prescribing guidelines and evidence standards, treatment, community-based capacity and care models, and communication, culture, and stigma. I will be part of an opening panel with FDA and CVS leadership on the current state of prescribing guidelines and evidence standards. I will be reaching out shortly to gather information on the current state of your opioid guidelines and your priorities for the NAM Collaborative. In addition, the CMSS Board has approved extending its two-year sponsorship of the National Academy of Medicine Collaborative on Physician Wellbeing and Resilience.
PCORI Project on Patient Engagement in Clinical Registries. We are officially launching our PCORI funded project on patient engagement in clinical registries with a meeting of our Advisory Committee next week. As we presented at the Registry Summit, 30 percent of our clinical registries reported some degree of patient engagement using a wide variety of strategies. I would welcome any input from individual societies about best practices in patient engagement in clinical registries, guideline and measure development, clinical trials, or related areas.
CMSS Advocacy on behalf of the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC). With strong encouragement from our Clinical Practice Guidelines Component Group, we submitted a letter on behalf of CMSS member societies to support the NGC. The CMSS letter of support for NGC was cited in an article in Vox. I was interviewed by the science writer for the NY Times for an editorial on the NGC. I’ve been working with foundations, coalitions and potential entities who could help support NGC as it moves toward a public-private partnership. With more than 200,000 visitors a month, we will continue to work to maintain this important resource that is central to guideline development for our societies.
CMSS Code for Conduct with Companies. I wanted to share that the 61st organization has signed onto the CMSS Code for Interaction with Companies. The medical community has been very appreciative of our willingness to post it as an open access document. We will continue to work with our General Counsel Component Group to keep this important resource up-to-date.
Norman B. Kahn Jr., MD Award for Exceptional Contributions to CMSS. This annual award honors an individual who has demonstrated exceptional contributions to CMSS that further its mission related to medical education, professionalism, and/or delivery of high quality, patient-centered healthcare. The deadline for nominations is August 3.
I look forward to seeing you in November. Have a great summer.
Helen Burstin, MD, MPH
hburstin@cmss.org
@helenburstin