CMS Board of Directors

Saturday, November 01, 2014 12:37 PM

CMS Board sets ambitious work plan for 2014-2015

by Kate Alfano, CMS contributing writer

The CMS Board of Directors adopted an ambitious work plan for the upcoming year at their meeting on Friday, Sept. 19. The plan will continually evolve to incorporate direction by the House of Delegates and to adapt to new situations and opportunities as they arise. The plan is directly tied to the CMS strategic plan – which was updated earlier in the year and approved by the House of Delegates at the 2014 annual meeting – and previous BOD and HOD actions.

The board broke into three groups to discuss in detail physician well-being and success, health care systems evolution, and organizational excellence. For each work plan item, members reviewed the proposed goal, the proposed objective and the proposed strategy, and then assigned a level of importance. They presented each item to the full board and approved the plan.

Internally, it outlines how CMS intends to upgrade and repurpose communications to physician constituencies, streamline administrative and governance functions, and boost outreach to medical students and other component societies. Externally, the plan top-lines how the society intends to engage and respond to the game-changing issues already in play – including Medicaid reform, repealing the SGR, and maintaining Colorado’s relatively stable liability climate – as well as those that are coming online, such as Colorado’s new Commission on Affordable Health Care and State Innovation Model, the federally funded initiative to integrate physical and behavioral health.

“Veterans of this extraordinary work on behalf of medicine understand that the words on these pages don’t convey what will be required of our advocates and volunteer physician leaders in terms of grace, magnanimity, diplomacy, risk taking, and consensus building under both internal and external pressure,” said CMS President Tamaan Osbourne-Roberts, MD.

“The scope of work embodied in the fiscal year 2014-2015 work plan of the CMS Board of Directors is an understatement of what is ahead of us over the coming year. The plan speaks for itself in terms of content and logic. In this time of market disruptions and realignments, our priorities have been deliberatively and methodically developed from the grassroots and our component organizations.”

CMS leaders hope the plan will effectively advance medicine’s voice in Colorado’s executive suites, the legislative and executive branches of state government, and the judiciary, if needed, on the behalf of Colorado physicians. Members can review the plan online at www.cms.org.