Executive office update: Experience The New CMS through the re-engineered annual meeting in Sept.

Friday, May 20, 2016 10:19 AM

by Alfred Gilchrist, CEO, Colorado Medical Society

This September Colorado physicians will come together as a community in Keystone for the first annual meeting to be held without a House of Delegates to engage state and national experts in the most pressing subjects for our medical community.

A CMS work group built the agenda from the ground up, drawn from a statewide physician survey of what is keeping medicine (and your advocates) up at night, and a methodical series of interviews and conversations with their peers. It has been re-engineered as a motivational sanctuary for physicians to share, argue and learn from the best of the best; it’s not the sort of thing you can get from a website. In an era of burnout and unrelenting change and stress, this gathering is intended to stimulate, entertain and help peers remember why they are doctors.

Colorado health policy, market innovations and the applied politics that drive them are among the factors that keep Colorado a vanguard state, which means expressing your ideas in Keystone this fall will have consequences beyond our state. Programs will include:

• A comprehensive and up-close discussion with the proponents and opponents of the statewide ballot initiatives: ColoradoCare single payer referendum and the Oregon-Washington state adaptation regarding physician-assisted death.
• A deep dive into the complexities of the impending radical realignment of Medicare payments from fee for service into the universe of performance/quality-based reimbursement, followed by an informed conversation and workshop sessions on the what ifs and how-to’s, led by experts from the AMA, who have developed a range of support tools, and our longtime friend and regional medical liaison from Medicare.
• A motivational kickoff led by one of Colorado’s most highly regarded wellness experts, followed by a series of breakouts on how to get healthy and stay healthy conducted by our top physician trainers.
• Recurring breakout discussions (eligible for CME credit) by the been-there-doing-that experts on hot topics of broad medical interest: best practices on how to wean a patient off pain medications, how to manage a dangerous patient with a firearm, and a doctor-friendly discussion with top antitrust experts on the trajectory of the proposed health plan mega mergers.
• And of course, given this is an election year, we will host a lively lunch discussion called “Voters hold the Trump card,” where Colorado’s top nonpartisan analyst, the AMA’s federal and congressional affairs guru, and our veteran lobby team will assess the down-ballot consequences of the presidential contest and speculate on the various win-lose scenarios and their respective influence on the direction of state and federal health policy. You will even get to vote your own preference, or lack thereof.

In fact, every session will include electronic straw polling opportunities before, during and after to challenge, agree with or simply inquire about these influencers and thought leaders. The panels will share recent Colorado physician polling measuring their views on the hot topics – such as physician assisted death, the single payer proposal, the mega merger wars, and the health plan pain points and policy push-back options we will pursue, all analyzed by our crack pollster, Benjamin Kupersmit, who has been measuring physician opinions and insights for us for nearly a decade.

As the first mass-gathering manifestation of CMS’ reinvented horizontal, grassroots interactive governance model, your opinions and levels of interest will be a real-time direct pipeline to the CMS Board of Directors, who will be asking you for very pointed assessments on where and to what degree medicine should weigh in on these pressing and mutual concerns.

If there is a consensus to be found for advocacy in the public affairs arena, this will be where it starts. And you will be the first to test-drive the sophisticated Internet technologies that will connect your ideas with CMS policies and priorities.

See you in Keystone.