President’s letter: Charting the future course

Monday, January 01, 2018 12:05 PM

by M. Robert Yakely, MD, President, Colorado Medical Society

CMS has served members over the years primarily as an advocacy organization that champions issues important to you and your patients. Over the past decade, we have led the fight to maintain Colorado’s stable liability climate, enacted managed care reforms and supported efforts that have reduced Colorado’s uninsured rate to the lowest in the state’s history.

To chart our future course, the board held a weekend retreat in mid-November 2017 designed to focus on the future of CMS. The process for taking a hard look at who we are, where we’ve been and where we are going is evidence-based because we are keeping you, our members, involved in this vital process. To accurately reflect our members’ goals, we will be asking for your input on how best to position the organization to deal with marketplace and public policy uncertainties. We will be taking your pulse on your levels of professional dissatisfaction that result from excessive regulation, burdensome paperwork, and EMRs that are designed mostly for billing and poorly designed for accurately documenting the problems your patients need you to address.

To that end the board has:

1. Utilized recent literature to identify major drivers of change in the marketplace.
2. Considered your input from our recent surveys to identify problems we need to address.
3. Used email and text messaging to keep our members informed of where our advocacy has brought direct tangible benefits to all Colorado physicians.
4. Reviewed and revised our purpose, values and vision.                    

At our January board meeting we will approve on a preliminary basis the revised purpose, values and vision along with a new set of goals. We will send these out for your review and comment as soon as the meeting adjourns, taking final action in March after your perspective is given full consideration.    

I am grateful to all members who took the time to respond to the survey in advance of our weekend retreat, and I thank in advance those who will review and comment on the new set of goals. I think it is important for our members to know that you are the rudder that guides this ship. We can represent you best when you give us your perspectives in our surveys. Feel free to reach out to me personally at any time by emailing me at president@cms.org.