I feel like I could just yell, and we'd be good. Good afternoon, morning, afternoon, morning. I'm Eileen Murray. I'm CEO of the American Epilepsy Society, and I was privileged to be part of the planning committee for the program today. This is the rapid-fire session. We have six speakers, some of whom are here, some in front row, and we'll rotate through fairly quickly. Everybody has about five to seven minutes. We're going to try to really hold to the rapid-fire approach. I'll introduce everyone first, and then we'll hold questions until the end, so that way I don't want to risk having anybody's presentation cut short, but we'll make sure that we leave a good 10 minutes or so for questions at the end. So to start, I'm going to introduce everyone in the order in which they'll be presenting. Amy Fisher is Senior Director of Communications at the American Gastroenterological Association. She's been with AGA for nearly 18 years, and previous to that was an Account Supervisor at Spectrum Science Communications and Account Executive with Ketchum PR. She holds a BA from George Washington University and has deep experience in planning and implementing integrated communication strategies to achieve business and organizational objectives. Eric Muehlbauer, MJCAE, has been Executive Director of the North American Spine Society. I have the acronym, and I didn't look up the full title since September of 1994. He has a Master's in Jurisprudence in Health Law and Policy from Loyola University's Chicago Law School and is a member of the American Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and has published over 50 articles and has a book coming out in February of next year called The Roadmap to Innovation. Congratulations on that. Salandra Thomas is Vice President, Talent and Organizational Development at the Infectious Disease Society of America. She is an experienced leader in human resources, talent management, and organizational development, specializing in leadership management and coaching, management consulting, and performance management, relationship improvements, and conflict resolution. Prior to IDSA, she was Human Resources Director at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. There's a job. She holds an MS in Organizational Development and Knowledge Management from George Mason University and a BA in Human Resources from the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. Her partner in presenting is Tracy Cereco, MBACAE, whose 20-plus years in association work extends across strategic planning, governance facilitation, market and brand strategy, membership engagement, educational product development, and technology strategy. She's currently Associate Executive Director, Specialty Engagement and Market Development at the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and she previously held senior leadership roles at Smith Bucklin. She has her MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and her BA in Political Science and International Studies from Northwestern. Our next speaker will be Dr. James Morgante, and I'm sorry, I meant to make sure I had that right. Yes, good. He's Associate Director of Qualitative and Survey Research Methods in ASCO's Center for Research and Analytics, where he provides methodological direction for quantitative and qualitative initiatives across ASCO to ensure collected data is accurate and tells the right story. He holds his doctorate and master's in psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, master's in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor's in special education from Vanderbilt. His postdoctoral training was in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. And finally, Mary Catherine Krause, MSCAE, is VP for Communication at the College of American Pathologists. She is responsible for planning, developing, and executing internal and external communications, branding, media relations, and crisis communications. She's experienced in hospital and medical association management, having held leadership positions at Rush University Medical Center, in University Relations and Medical Affairs, and the American College of Chest Physicians in continuing medical education and philanthropy. So with that, I will turn things over to the panel. You'll have between five and seven minutes. Warning, I will wave or do something if you're going way over. We have one hour, and we will make sure that we leave time for conversation and questions afterwards. So Amy. Hi, I'm Amy Fisher with the American Gastroenterological Association, and I'm going to talk about AGA's experience in working with patient social media influencers. So the program that we're going to be talking about today was funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Pfizer. Quickly, I'm going to talk about the role of patient influencers in sharing information and uniting patient communities online. I'm going to highlight the importance of providing scientific and medical knowledge to patients, share how AGA harnessed the power of social media influencers to ensure accurate information is being shared online with patient communities. So as you may be familiar, patient influencers are patients who share their experiences online, such as through blogs, TikToks, Instagram, et cetera, with other patients who are looking for information and real-world experiences from those with their condition. According to a survey by the Social Health Network, about 89% of patients shared that watching what patient community leaders or experts share online is very important to them on social media. And about 92% of patients talked about when the information about a medical condition is shared by a trusted patient influencer, they're more likely to ask their physician about that information. So quickly, just to level set, in IBD, excuse me, in GI, patients with inflammatory bowel disease make up a very large proportion of the patient influencer community. IBD includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. It's a chronic condition with a high morbidity, and it's characterized by severe symptoms such as diarrhea, rectal bleeding, and abdominal pain. It affects about 3 million Americans online, but due to the large morbidity of the condition and the fact that it significantly affects patients mentally, emotionally, and socially, patients really gather online. They really look to others with the condition, and social media has become a really strong way for them to get the information they're looking for. Since 2017, at AGA, we've been working with patients and sharing their patient voice. Through all of our patient education programs, we bring patients into our healthcare provider education programs. We invite them to consensus conferences to voice their thoughts on our guidelines, participate in roundtables, and we invite them to participate in our advocacy day. At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a huge increase of GI patient influencers online. They were rapidly gaining prominence within their social communities, but we also noticed the large majority of them were sharing their personal experiences, not from a point of science, but a point of what worked for them, and unfortunately, a lot of the information that some of the individuals were sharing could be seen as harmful to other patients. We believe that it's important for patients with GI illnesses to understand the science so that they can educate those who are looking to them for advice and guidance. We worked with a prominent science-minded patient influencer by the name of Tiana Swanee-Omprakash. She has her own platform called Own Your Crohn's. We created the idea of the IBD Influencer Education Program to make sure individuals were getting that science-infected information, and indeed, knew how to look online on their own to find the information that could be helpful to other patients. So Tiana served as co-chair to the program, along with the AGA patient education advisor. We also identified three AGA member IBDologists to participate and serve as mentors to the patient influencers who were part of the program, and they helped answer questions and guide them through the education session. The overall goals of the program were to increase the number of educated and empowered IBD patient influencers, as well as to work with them to share correct and useful information on each of their chosen social platforms. So our biggest thing is we didn't want the influencers to stop using their authentic voice and to stop speaking to their followers from their personal experience, but we wanted to make sure they had the knowledge to understand the science about their disease, about GI, et cetera, so they could interpret that science to ensure their followers were receiving accurate information. We identified eight patient influencers who participated in the first cohort of the program. They were a very diverse group. They were all very excited to participate and be chosen for the program, as you'll see over the next couple of slides. We coordinated a program of six educational webinars on a variety of topics, and we worked with experts in each of the fields to help train the patient influencers on how to better share and distribute information with their followers. So the education program was important for many reasons, not least of which to teach the influencers how to look at data and how to best interpret the data from their perspective, but we actually wanted to prepare them to come to our annual meeting, which they did this past year. So the program started with an overview of inflammatory bowel disease, including both Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, because we found that most patients, even though they have a basic understanding of their condition and how it affects them, they don't understand the science of what their disease is. They don't really know what they're talking about, unfortunately, when they're speaking about treatment and new treatments that are coming to market or diagnoses. So we thought it was really important to educate the influencers who were talking to other patients about their condition from that scientific standpoint. We also then worked with our AGA journal editors, and we created a webinar on the science behind the data. So the editors reviewed what clinical trials are, talked about what the peer review process is, went through the difference between and how to read medical journal studies versus medical abstracts that are being presented at meetings to help the influencers better understand what actually goes into scientific research. We offered a session on journalistic training to help the influencers understand how to translate the science into layman's terms. We worked with a medical, a consumer medical editor and a former TV news anchor who has IBD to create that program. We also developed the training specific to social media to help them understand their power and their voice on social media and what their responsibility is when they're speaking with other patients. And for that one, we worked with an AGA member, an IBDologist, who herself is very prominent on social media, as well as an IBD patient influencer who has a podcast, who has thousands of followers, not only within the patient community, but also within the provider community about IBD. And then we rounded out the program with a session on branding, because we wanted to help the influencers better understand how to build their brand. And that was led by a branding and marketing professional, as well as a program co-chair who I mentioned has Own Your Crones, and she herself has over 10,000 followers on Instagram, so she comes, she's an MPH, and she has a very good handle on how to best speak with her followers and share her personal story, but doing so in a responsible way to make sure patients need to talk to their providers as well. The program culminated with AGA hosting the influencers at our annual meeting, Digestive Disease Week, pictured here in Chicago. And the influencers really appreciated the opportunity not only to meet and spend time with each other in person, but also the ability to attend the sessions, to learn about new advances in the field. They were actually all really overwhelmed when they saw the dedication of gastroenterologists and others who were attending the meeting, and the fact that they were presenting data on how to improve their lives. It was interesting to see these patient influencers didn't quite understand what goes on at medical meetings. They've never been to one, but when they actually saw the dedication of the gastroenterologists and others who were there, and the pharma companies, it really touched something in them, and really just helped them report from a more personal perspective. They were also really excited to interact with AGA members and with meeting attendees, and to talk to GIs about their patient experiences. We had one of the influencers attended an AGA policy session, and she stood up and spoke about her experience, and how long it took her to get diagnosed, and how severe her disease was at diagnosis. And she shared her intimate details about, you know, she lost her colon, and I mean she went through her entire patient experience, and everyone in the room was crying because they were so touched to hear a patient felt like she could share this information. And it helped them better understand, and it reminded them why they're there, and what they were doing. And actually, our policy committee has already asked if we could have one of the patients next year at TDW present again. Using their learnings from the webinars, they also reported real-time at TDW. So again, they use TikTok, Instagram, their social platforms, and they reported from the meeting, as well as throughout the entire program. So after each session, we did work with them to report about what they've been learning on their social media channels, and they used the hashtag AGA IBD influencers, so we could follow them, and they could follow, obviously, track their own metrics. So the program overall led to hundreds of posts. We had thousands of likes and shares, which was wonderful, and each of the patients not only gained more patient followers to their platform, but AGA social channels benefited, and we gained more followers to our platform, as well. And we really, we formed a lasting relationship with the influencers. So not only do we have patients outside of these individuals with whom we work, but when we post, and when we reach out to them, and ask them for help, or opinions, or thoughts, they're very responsive. So we formed a very strong relationship with the patient influencers. So we're very proud of conceiving and implementing this program. As GI patient influencers continue to gain prominence within their respective patient communities, we believe it's really important to educate those who have well-known platforms to help ensure that they're sharing accurate and science-based information with their followers. And as new patients enter the field, we're really, we aim to help them understand the science, and help them to ensure their patients are receiving correct, legitimate guidance from their peers. So right now, we're looking to expand this program to other areas of GI. I mean, our goal is, GI is a very diverse area. So we're hoping to be able to expand this to other areas, and to continue this program into next year. Thank you. All right, before we get into this, I want to say happy Veterans Day to any veterans out there. Quick story, my nine-year-old niece got into the car yesterday with her mom, my sister, and she's so excited because she's supposed to wear red, white, and blue tomorrow, meaning today. And my sister said, well, do you know why you're supposed to do that? Yep, because we're honoring vegetarians. All right, so if you're a vegetarian, feel honored. So I'm not sure where my slides went. So Spine 20 is what I'm talking about. It's gone. Hello? Oh, he's working on it back there. So you all know about the G20 conference. It's a summit. It was originally supposed to be for 20 countries. It's the biggest economies in the world. They've added the African Union now, as well as the European Union. So it's really about a hundred and one. So several years ago, North American Spine Society got invited to participate in something called Neuroscience 20. That was 2018-2019. We got invited to this event that was in conjunction with the G20 in Argentina and Osaka. So we got invited because one of our board members was on the board of something called the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics, and brain and spine are very much linked. So Buenos Aires 2018, I was there with a couple of my board members, and then we invited Eurospine, which is the biggest spine society in Europe, representing about 40 different countries. And then we also expanded into Osaka in the following year. So we were there to discuss brain and spine diseases at each event, and then there was a set of policy recommendations. They were developed at the conference, and the idea was we would take these policy recommendations and shop them around to the G20 countries. But it was a big black box. G20 is in a different place every year, and it's almost like they have to create it from scratch every year. So there's no institutional memory. You can't go to a staff person and say, hey, last year we did this. We'd like to do this for the next year. There was no formal relationship between N20 and G20, and we were there because spine problems are the number one cause of disability worldwide, and depression is the number two cause of disability. So in Osaka, I sat with a couple of my friends, Margarita Nordin and Sami Elassie, and we hatched the idea of forming our own thing called Spine20. This is because spine is the number one cause of disability worldwide. It's an enormous burden on the economy, and government policies are urgently needed to address these things. So Spine20 is an advocacy group. We are up to probably 20 different societies now who are involved, and it's really a think tank that helps to provide guidance to governments on what their policies ought to be relative to spine care. And how can we help governments alleviate the burden of spine disease? Well, we're serving as a resource. We are advocating for changes to their policies. We're trying to help stimulate innovation and advance spine research. Again, the group of 20, that's how it started. Again, it's about 101 countries right now. It really had, it debuted really in 2008 when there was an economic crisis, so they got together to work together on economic policy. And again, that's a forum comprising of originally 19 countries, and they get together. Next year it's going to be in Brazil. This past year it was in India. And so we are developing a legitimate connection to the G20. We did something through the C20, which is Civil20, which is civil engineers. There's something called T20, which is a think tank that's associated with the G20, and there's a health ministers group, and we started to get involved with the health ministers in 2022 and 2023. The other thing we did differently is we formed policy recommendations before the event that are discussed, vetted, and approved by all the boards of the Spine Societies, and then we've got better underpinnings. We actually also write a paper with these recommendations. It's been published in the European Spine Journal, the North American Spine Societies Journal. We're trying to get some into the Lancet, but that's a really tough nut to crack. And this past year we had our biggest success where the health ministers of India adopted our recommendations. So the idea of getting them to listen to us was just part of it, and I have to give credit to the Indian groups that we work with. They were instrumental in getting with the Sherpas, as they're called, and reached to the health ministers. And so the goal for 2024 in Brazil is to make presentations at the health ministers meeting, which we have not been able to do yet. And again, we're trying to advance global spine care through these recommendations. And one of the biggest concerns we have is what does it mean to be a spine practitioner around the world? We know what it means in the U.S. What does it mean in Indonesia? What does it mean in Brazil? What's the core curriculum that these folks have to study in order to call themselves a spine practitioner? So we're working very hard with all these other groups and trying to level the playing field and improve spine care around the world. The policy recommendations are available through PubMed, so if you'd like a link to any of that, please let me know and I'm happy to supply that. So again, Riyadh was the first one that I was at as Spine20. Trying to get to Riyadh during 2020 was really interesting. I'll tell you that story another day. Then we were in Rome, Bali, Indonesia, New Delhi, and then we go to Rio, South Africa, and USA. Thank you. Hi everyone, Solandra Thomas again with the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Thanks to CMSS for accommodating both of us. Tracy and I have been partnering on this important project and partnering with many of your organizations on this project. All right, so here with my friend and colleague Tracy Sirico. And so we are presenting on behalf of many societies that are in this room that are part of this project. So this project started as part of the Equity Matters program that we each completed last year, and that project required a capstone, which we started together just thinking about all of the things that we have in common in terms of the strategic goal to diversify the physician population. So we all rallied around that and wound up with a number of organizations, again many here today participating in this project. So this is formally known as Joint Capstone, if you all have heard of that, and now relabeled driving measurable DEI improvements to advance the physician workforce. So that is our cause. So if there are individuals in the room, and I won't take long, who are participating, I see Karen and and others who are part of the project, thank you, raising their hands. So there are others. So we'll say a couple of times during this presentation, if you're not already a part, we're asking other specialty societies to join us. So pull either Tracy or I aside if you're interested in learning more. Is there a secret to this? Oh, there we go. Okay. Can I go back? Red button. Thank you. Way back. Am I going? No, it seemed to have skipped to the next deck. I'm going to have to speak quickly to make up some time. I know. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Yeah, maybe we should just let you go. Okay. All right. Let me try again. There we go. Okay. That's the slide. So we have no disclosures. Just a brief look at the structure of our project. We have an advisory committee led by 12 experts among the societies that are participating, and the advisory committee is led by Dr. Bonnie Simpson Mason, who is also the foundational brain trust behind the Equity Matters Program. Our work is organized into the two work streams that you see here. Group one is responsible for identifying and implementing strategies that can increase the pool of applicants into medical school, so starting at undergraduate and supporting them through matriculation from medical school. And then project two that you see here on the right-hand side is responsible for identifying and implementing cross-society strategies to ensure the availability of and that these programs are promoted, mentorship, coaching, sponsorship programs that can support those that are underrepresented in medicine. Common across both the work streams is an effort to harmonize the demographic data that we would love to see along the pathway so that we can determine where we might be losing people, and at various stages in what we call the leaky pathway. This is a list of all of the participating societies, so we have 22 and counting who are working on this effort together. We have nine that are working on project one. We have 17 organizations working specifically on project two, and we have a number of organizations that have representatives assigned to both work streams, and while we're working very closely together and we're aligned, there are some specific action items that each group is taking responsibility for moving forward. And then I'd also like to highlight that the Organization of Program Directors Association is partnering also in this project. And so the main update that we want to share with you all today, and we began this effort about a year and a half ago, by the way. We've done a lot of, had a lot of successes and collaborated on a lot of successful action items, but we mainly want to provide an update on our society survey. So hopefully many of you, and our second request is join us if you haven't already participated in our survey to society, which is mainly to help us understand the breadth and depth of mentorship, sponsorship related programs that each of your societies is offering. And so that survey is going to be administered in two phases, so we're just wrapping up phase one to get some baseline information around the programs, and so we'll share some data that we've collected thus far on that. And then the second part of the survey will be to dig a little deeper, do a deeper dive into how these programs have been operationalized and resourced and measured, among other things. So if you participated, you know, we'll just, we'll talk more about part two when we get closer to that stage in the process. Aggregate data will be shared with all of participating organizations, and then the ultimate goal is to create a tool that will be more broadly visible to societies and outwardly around these programs, because the goal is to make sure that they're adequately promoted and made available to those that are in the pathway for, in the physician pathway who may need them. And just one more slide before I turn it over to Tracy. Interim participation, again we have 23 specialty societies who are participating in the project. We have 21 that have completed the survey, and out of now 53 CMSS societies, 7 out of 30 OPTA organizations have participated. And we're happy to share that we are collecting information on 82 unique programs. So there's a lot there and a lot more to go. Again, talk to one of us if you haven't yet participated, and we can show you how. Thank you. Thanks Alondra, and thanks to the CMSS staff for quickly pulling the top level data for us to take a look at. Again, this is only preliminary results, but you'll get a sense for some of the questions, some of the early trends of what we're seeing in the information. By far the largest portions of program types were networking, leadership development, and mentorship that was peer-to-peer. And you can kind of see the other categories of allyship and sponsorship are a little bit smaller. When we talked about the key components that comprised the program, the largest were events with different kinds of sessions and grants and financial assistance, and then program frameworks that help with asynchronous activities kind of following from that. Looking at the target audience, we spent a lot of time when we divided the projects, really looking at, like we had the pathway one leading into the specialty, or sorry, leading into medical school, and then project two, which really focused on this research, was once an individual is in the specialty or is already a medical student, how are they receiving supports? So not surprising. We spent a lot of time talking about residents and those in fellowship, and those were the top categories in terms of who is supported by these different types of programs. In doing the research, we are going to be looking at, we're giving you top level, literally pulled days ago, results just from the initial questions, but we are going to look at cross tabulation to understand who was a target audience for some of the different programs so that you can share within your organizations and use this information to help develop those types of programs. So you'll see kind of residency, fellowship, and then medical students, followed by those who are mid or later in their careers. We did ask some other kinds of questions about the support or the framework for the programs to get insights from the different organizations. So we asked if the program was designed for those with impacted life experiences, such as discrimination, socioeconomic status, or historically underserved. 59% told us yes. We asked about measuring the impact of the programs. This is an important point. We didn't go deep into understanding that impact yet because we didn't want to scare everyone away from filling out the extra long survey, but we do have the intent to do that in the future. We were happy to see that 56% are starting to measure the impact of the programs. We don't know exactly what that means yet, but we do want to follow up on that and ultimately be able to capture some of that impact and potentially even publish on those results to help be able to move the needle and share that going forward. We also asked, that's from the organizational perspective, right? So do they feel like the program has made an impact? We also asked if the organizations allow the participants to evaluate the program, which we feel is an even more effective indicator in terms of success. And a large portion, which I didn't get the number on, over 50% said yes, that they allow the participants to evaluate the program, which gives us the opportunity to go back and kind of investigate that some more to understand how those participants see progress through the program and can evaluate successes, which we were happy to see. We asked some other questions about directly or indirectly reducing disparities in healthcare. 45% said yes. Almost an equal portion said unknown. So that's something for us to look into further. And then we talked about directly or increasing, oh, I think we already had this slide, directly or increasing the number, sorry, the physicians with impacted life experiences in the pathway of medicine. So it's slightly different than the other question. And 45% said yes. A larger portion told us that's unknown. So really that was just to give a high level overview of a direct poll from the data. Just to reinforce our ask, we do hope that we see 100% of societies participating in the survey. It's going to be our best effort to collect this information. So we can make sure that you have access to this and the link to follow up and do that. And if you're interested in joining the project effort, please reach out to Salandra or myself. Hi, everyone. My name is Jim Morganti. Today I am delighted to share a project update from our CMSS CPD PPG. And that changed automatically for me. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, format, availability, and frequency of CPD activities changed. As a result of these changes, there may have been changes in learner preference. Over the past few years, our group has been seeking to understand the potential changes in preference through a mixed methods design. Mixed methods design, last year we incorporated quantitative methods. Two surveys, we administered an organizational survey. This sought to understand the potential evolution of annual meetings from 2019 through 2022. Shortly thereafter, it was followed up by a learner survey. With the learner survey, we were trying to understand what learner preferences were prior to the pandemic and after. This year, we've taken a qualitative approach. We wanted to further contextualize our data through focus groups. With these focus groups, it's understanding preferences beyond annual meeting. For our focus groups, as far as what it was, just so you know, it is not a group discussion. It is not a group interview. We sought to have a conversation that was guided by a moderator. The design was six to eight participants. They were scheduled for one hour in duration. We hope to have at least three to four focus groups that we could achieve theoretical saturation. All of the sessions were audio recorded so that we could go back and look at the transcripts after collection. The approach is best designed as market research. The questioning route, the structure was such that we would be able to better our CPD learning format offerings. It was a multi-category design. We looked at physicians who had been in practice for less than seven years and those that had been in practice for over seven years. As far as participants, with regards to recruitment, earlier this year, participating societies sent an email letting them out to their members, a small group, letting them know that this was happening. Emails went out in the beginning of the summer. We had our recruitment during the summer months. Focus groups were conducted in August. We had 19 participating physicians representing seven specialties. As far as the questioning route, we wanted to know, during your experience as a learner at the height of the pandemic, what worked well? What didn't work well? What were your barriers? What were the opportunities for improvement? Right now, having experienced potentially different formats, what are you currently preferring? What do you think you're going to do over the next 12 months? If you could give your society information, feedback about your preferences, what would you want them to know? As far as the results and thinking about themes in the conversation, one of the things that came through that was a common thread was learners expressing their desire to take an active role in their own learning. First box, one of the comments, annual meeting. I go to connect with my colleagues, network, however, online, I have to learn. I'm focused because it's me and the learning. Another share was accessibility and having greater availability through online learning. In the bottom left-hand corner, a comment about transition from annual meeting to online offerings that allow somebody greater flexibility to spend their own time thinking about engagement at their own preference. And in the last box, bottom right-hand corner, participating in more webinars because more were offered. So overall, as far as our discussion, what we learned is that learners appreciate autonomy and being able to take greater control of their own learning, picking and choosing the content format and appreciating that something different is happening than what they experienced before. So one of our understandings, findings from this textualized data that came through in the focus groups is an appreciation for greater choice in CPD activity participation, you're getting flexibility, talking about just-in-time learning, increased variety, mentions of the webinars, it's self-paced, you go back and look, learn on your own time, and when it comes to annual meeting, this view, this use of it differently than as before. And again, just like to shout out to all of the people within our group, helping to make this research possible. Thank you. Oh, what did I do? Okay, imagine that your father has kidney disease and your father has to be sicker than everybody else to get the same level of care, treatment, even attention. Well, that's the story that hopefully all of you heard this morning of College of American Pathologist member Dr. Latonza Adams about her father. And I bet you, like me, would say, that's not fair. What is that about? And it's because of a test called Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate, EGFR, that had a race-based coefficient because it was incorrectly thought that a black person had a higher muscle mass and thus had a higher creatinine level. So this race-based coefficient was created. Again, not fair. So better late than never, I guess, a new non-race-based coefficient was created to measure EGFR and established in September of 2021. The College of American Pathologists, where I work as the vice president for communications, just wanted to implement and drive adoption of this new non-race-based algorithm as fast as possible with our 8,000 accredited medical laboratories. So it was September of 2021. We went about a year and thought, how are we doing? What's going on? What's the pickup? And through a study that we published in the Journal of American Medical Association, along with the work of many of you in this room, we found that only 11% of clinical laboratories as of March of 2022 had either driven adoption of this new equation or planned to incorporate this new equation by the end of 2022. And again, we thought, at least from the perspective of the College of American Pathologists, that's not good enough, even though 57% were trying to figure out all of the logistics of that. So we created a multi-channel communications campaign to reduce disparities across specialties and across departments. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today, how we did that. Green light, green, right? But do it that way? There we go, so this is we started first by creating I'm not gonna have time of course to show you the video and you guys can have the slides later but any multi-channel communication plan you have to create content and our creation of the content was first through this video of Dr. Adams story and then what we did is we have a patient this is more of a show-and-tell from here on out we have a patient website called your pathologist org and we featured that along with other how to read your pathology report and other information we featured the video on there and drove advertisements to your pathologist org we also incorporated paid advertising as part of our multi-channel communications campaign and when we watch streaming channels and you're forced to either watch full episode player video or over-the-top video that's that's what we incorporated and we also did this over social media then we pitched to the media so you've all maybe heard of the term in terms of multi-channel communications earned owned owned is the video we own it our content paid paid advertising and secondary endorsement through the media media relations we pitched and we got pickup from med page today dr. radio ABC affiliates and more some more examples of this pathology labs making progress on removing race and kidney function testing trying trying to fix the race based the race that the biased lab testing and the point of all of this was a top-down and a bottom-up approach the bottom-up approach was making sure that the laboratories were going to work to incorporate this new non-race based EGFR testing at the same time what the video and all of our other multi-channel communications were about making sure patients were aware that in certain this consumer oriented market to ask you know where their testing is going and will their kidney function testing be non race based testing a few more of these examples and we have a sponsorship with the American Hospital Association we leverage that relationship and created a podcast addressing and eliminating bias in laboratory medicine so this podcast was directed to health executives and I think it's about their 47,000 members 6,000 hospitals that are members of the American Hospital Association we also of course made sure to let our members know what we were doing to educate the public about them about this and for them to share it with their patients and their networks we have a philanthropic arm at the College of American pathologists that since 2001 has provided 7,000 screenings of breast cancer and cervical cancer to women in need it's called see test and treat and this is a program that we partner with you all in another medical specialty societies it varies a little bit based on location of all the additional health screenings that are provided that through this relationship we created a relationship with Hologic that brought in Katie Couric media which we were thrilled about and we were able to focus this discussion on reducing health disparities in women in this case specifically and then because of our advocacy arm and the advocacy function of the organization leveraging that function in addition to our philanthropic function function and other CMS s awards and grants that we've received we were able to get a seat at the table at the National Black Caucus health council our president was able to present their talk about lab testing the promotion of non-race based EGFR testing and then other things testing algorithms that we're working with you on related to transgender medicine and other areas and we hope to continue that seat at that table to drive you know addressing health disparities and then also in in multi-channel communications not to forget peer-reviewed journal articles and the value in documenting your research the initial research that I documented was published in JAMA letter to the editor 11% had implemented the plan so this is hot off the press clinical chemistry and 2023 as of March of 2023 and we're still in 2023 and as expected medical laboratories expected to implement this new EGFR non-race based testing by the end of the year is 92% I know we're not done yet but that's really good and it just is a testament that we have to tackle this in every way possible and in every way that we can through our organizations and our partnerships and in the end what will patients now be seen in their medical record charts this non-race based clinical testing and I hope can't can't and can't say it yeah I wasn't gonna talk about this is actually my recent results and I in my EHR and I've been watching this change in the last two years I've had testing in 2011 16 and others and I went back and I saw that at the end of the results you know it's a race-based non-race based and and it was described at the bottom now when I go into and I just got this a couple weeks ago my results don't even come up from previous years they're zeroed out and what I only I see are these recent calculations which is quite interesting but thank you thank you everybody and thank thank you so much for sticking with the the rapid fire approach and we do indeed have 10 minutes for questions so if anybody has a question and I see some of these things and I just get infuriated and then I'm like, okay, why am I wasting my energy So I guess it depends, unfortunately. When patients, for some reason, don't have information that's correct, we reach out to them and we make sure they have the proper information. When patients are sharing information that's not correct, I'll be honest, I mean, if it's someone we know, if it's someone we have a relationship with, we will reach out directly. If we don't have that relationship, we really rely on our patient influencers and we give individuals who are coming at it from the base of science and we let them talk peer-to-peer. So we might reach out to one of them, if we see it, obviously. Make sure we reach out to one of them and ask them to follow up and then we can get involved at some point. But we found that medical societies, it can be seen as going after a patient for having the wrong information so we really try to rely more on peer-to-peer when it comes to patient information. Thank you. I had a follow-up question. So you're working with patient influencers and so my question was, so they're sharing their experience and these are people, they have the disease and they're talking with people, so how do you ensure that the information they're sharing is correct and being correctly communicated? And then I'm just curious, is there any kind of, I don't know, checklist or something that, like legal concerns or perhaps if this influencer has a bad experience with the provider, is there some kind of disconnection between your organization and the patient and influencer to say like, oh, that was them, not us? I'm just curious. No, it's a good question. So the patients with whom we work on patient education programs or have participated in the influencer program, we work with them to not talk about brands and to talk about specific products and while they're working with us and contracted with us to not talk about those kinds of specific experiences if they are having difficulty with the provider. Once we're not under contract with them, we have no contact with them. There's nothing we can do. If we see that for some reason the information they're putting out is incorrect, then we follow up with them and educate them and work with them to either put out a retraction if they're still under contract with us or see how we can try to mitigate that problem. Questions? I had a question for Eric. I'm fascinated by the choice of going through the G20. Epilepsy has something going with the WHO, which is a whole different, but going at it from the economic impact. And I'm curious how you're measuring over time. What are you looking at in terms of obviously adoption of the recommendations? Are there other things that you're tracking? It sounds like you were on our conference call the other day. Now that India is adopting the recommendations, we want to do a study on what those recommendations led to. The goal is to improve care and efficiency. We're trying to figure out in India what they're spending on certain conditions. We still haven't figured out how to design that study yet, but that's front and center that we know we need to do. We're still a young organization, only four years. Having the peer-reviewed journal articles gives us a level of credibility with the governments. So we know that it's going to take time for them to really listen to us until we get this data. So, I had a, on the CAP program, I'm curious about, I think we all struggle with getting the media attention, that earned media. Could you talk a little bit more about what you found worked well, what got the appropriate level of pickup and attention and across lots of different, I mean, it's impressive, it's not just medical journals, it's what you really want. It's been years of work, I would say, since hiring someone with real, not real expertise, but since 2015, having a person with only media relations background, newsroom background, former news reporter, we were, a lot of us in communications do a little bit of media relations and we were toggling media relations, so it was first getting someone that makes it, that really knows that business and is specialized in it. And then over time, we were more reactive instead of proactive, so building a proactive media relations component, creating our own news, building a newsroom, doing radio media tours, satellite media tours, having media briefings regularly, webinars with journalists, so that's kind of building the engine. And then during COVID, it was all about testing and our members at first were really angry with us because they said, everyone's out there talking about COVID and we're the ones doing the testing, why aren't we in the news? We're like, we're working on it, we're working on it. And we got them in the news, but when things, it was, you know, we made lemonade out of lemons, but when things like that happen, then you need to try and maintain that. So that was relationships with reporters and continuing to answer their questions, even when sometimes they're asking very difficult questions about laboratories, maybe potentially negative, but a tenet of media relations is that, you know, you need to tell your story before someone else does. So it's been repetition over time, but then in this instance, it was lots of pitching and taking every opportunity that came our way and creating our own news with a media briefing. Mm-hmm. Great. I have one more question, I think we have a couple minutes. So this is for Dr. Magante on the CPD. One of my questions is, you know, the data shows people like online learning. How do you reconcile how they are voting with their feet, which may not always coincide exactly with that? Is it a problem with the delivery? Is it just it's an and? Or, because I'll just be, like in our case, we're not seeing quite that strong a preference. The online for our annual meeting, for example, more people are coming, our meeting in person is growing. The online version is, you know, it's there. It's not something we wouldn't do, but it's dropped off considerably. So we're fortunate because we do have the survey from last year, focus groups this year. So focus groups are just adding to that existing story. And one of the things that we're finding is it's not just online learning, the offerings during the pandemic. It's not just a band-aid, a temporary stopgap that was offered in a short term. People continue to see value in those activities, and it is an and. It's not an or, but having what was before with the survey that we conducted, annual meeting has seen as a great opportunity to connect with colleagues, network. So it's not replacing, but having the additional options to augment the learner experience. Great. Well, I thought it was a really important observation that it's, you choose each for very different reasons, potentially. And having both of those options is important. Okay, other questions? Please do the two-minute wait in case anybody thinks of anything. Great, well, thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you for doing the rapid-fire version. It was really great to have such a range of programs presented. Thank you.

rapid-fire session

patient social media influencers

inflammatory bowel disease

Spine 20

continuing professional development

diversity, equity, and inclusion

mentorship and sponsorship programs

non-race-based estimated glomerular filtration rate

patient care