President’s Message

As promised in our spring newsletter, the Board of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) had a retreat in August to consider the mission and focus of CMSS going forward. I am proud to report the excellent work that the Board did under the leadership of our new EVP & CEO Helen Burstin and offer some thoughts to consider as we go into the November meeting. We will ask you to consider this new focus and help us evaluate the strategic discussions and translate them into action over the next several years.

A new mission statement was drafted and will be discussed in November. The proposed statement is as follows:

CMSS will be indispensable to medical specialty societies and the profession by:

  1. Supporting member organizations to fulfill their missions, address future challenges, and optimize specialty society performance
  2. Catalyzing improvement in health care and physician education through a collective voice, collaboration, and action across specialties
  3. Providing a proactive platform to address emerging and critical issues across specialty societies that will influence the future of health care

The CMSS leaders on the Board had complete agreement with this statement. It captures objectives that CMSS can accomplish and that our participating member organizations will value. We will provide more details regarding the thinking behind each of these elements and provide some examples of potential projects to operationalize these three areas in November.

The effect of this strategic shift will be to increase the relevance and prominence of CMSS, increase member engagement, and alter some of our governance structure and focus. I hope you had a great summer and you have given some thought to where you would like to see CMSS go. We will spend most of the meeting talking about these strategic planning elements and get your input. We also hope that you will make it a priority to come to the CMSS Summit on the Future of Physician Learning and Improvement before our CMSS Annual Meeting on November 15, 2018 .

David Hoyt, MD