PRESIDENT’S COLUMN by Alan H. Matsumoto, MD, FSIR
Better quality care needs our
collaborative spirit “The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” —Thomas Stallkamp, former president, Chrysler Corporation
sentiment expressed by Stallkamp rings more true than ever for health care providers as IR practices attempt to adapt to the challenges associated with health care changes.
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As these changes are implemented, we cannot let shrinking health care dollars, local or national politics, individual agendas or other internal or external forces divide us in our efforts to improve the lives of our patients. IRs need to stand together with one unified and prominent voice rather than with multiple, divided small voices (i.e., private vs. academic; hospital-based vs. independent; oncology vs. vascular; full-time vs. part-time IR). As we stand hand-in-hand, we must also be more aligned with the health systems in which we practice and expand our collaborations with practitioners from other like-minded medical specialties. We must partner with their respective societies to advocate for the highest quality of care for our patients and provide a unified and influential message to CMS, FDA, private payers, legislators and research funding agencies.
Collaboration among the various medical specialties is becoming more and more critical as federal agencies, payers and legislators are less likely to respond to self-serving messages and lobbying from medical specialties. Indeed, unity among specialties providing similar services is becoming requisite to garner the necessary traction for any requests or ideas. SIR and many of its members have been instrumental in fostering such collaborative approaches for advocacy and the delivery of patient care, while also pursuing the acquisition of meaningful outcomes data as exemplified by the PRESERVE trial. This trial is being done in partnership with the Society of Vascular Surgery (SVS), but it also involves members from the Society of Vascular Medicine (SVM) and the Society of Cardiac Angiography and Interventions (SCAI).
In an effort to build on these collaborations, at the SIR annual meeting in 2015, SIR also hosted a series of “SIR Meets” sessions in which SIR members and practitioners from other societies came together to explore topics that span our specialties. For example, SIR members worked with members of SVS and SCAI to explore multidisciplinary approaches to the care of patients with pulmonary embolism. The Annual Meeting Committee received such positive feedback on these sessions that they plan to continue them at SIR 2016 in Vancouver.
4 IR QUARTERLY | WINTER 2016
ow physician services are measured, valued and remunerated is at a crossroads, as SIR Executive Director Susan E. Sedory Holzer, MA, CAE, discusses in her column in this edition of IRQ. The
More than ever, politicians, payers and even some hospital administrators are creating conflicts between and competition amongst practitioners. Indeed, many practices and health systems seem to be circling their wagons, and then shooting inside the circle. Therefore, SIR and its members must continue to develop more and stronger partnerships with other like- minded medical specialties so that our advocacy voice for patients will be stronger and more clearly resonate with those entities with whom we must lobby and advocate.
With this collaborative spirit in mind, I challenge each of you to look for opportunities to become more active within your health system or another medical society, whether as a member of a committee or working group, a chair of a committee or the president of a system or society. Many of our members already belong to groups such as the American College of Radiology, American Heart Association, American Urological Association and American Society of Nephrology, but there are many other societies and opportunities out there. Building these deep and unifying relationships will help IR to make a broader impact on the quality of patient care and, just as importantly, health care policy and economics.
Numbers do matter and advocacy is more important than ever. To this end, SIRPAC has proven to be critically important for SIR members. Indeed, 100 percent of the SIR Executive Council has personally contributed to SIRPAC this year, and I encourage each of you to do likewise. Even $100 will help.
SIR leadership is trying to create stronger and more meaningful relationships with other medical societies with a focus on enhancing and synergizing our educational, research, health policy and economic advocacy efforts and to drive higher-quality care in an environment with increasingly limited resources. I am pleased with the progress to date, but we need to keep moving forward so that we don’t move backwards. I hope that you will identify new opportunities in either your local environment or at a regional or national level and contribute to these efforts so that we can bring the collaborative and innovative spirit of interventional radiology together with other specialties to effect change with a more unified voice and compelling message to hospital administrators, federal agencies, legislators and payers.
Ultimately, we should listen to the wisdom of Aesop’s fable, “The Four Oxen and the Lion,” and to what John Dickinson wrote in “The Liberty Song” in 1768: “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”
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