Good afternoon and welcome to the CMSS Annual Meeting. I'm Mike Shepard, CMSS President. Glad that you all could be here with us today. I want to thank our Program Committee, who has developed an outstanding meeting for us here today, as well as our PPG Chairs and so forth. Working through the program earlier today, I've heard a lot of positive feedback, not only the CEO PPG, but several of the other PPGs that I've run into some of the Chairs and some of the attendees, an outstanding job. Also want to thank our staff, certainly, for all the hard work they've done to put this together, and certainly thank our sponsors for being here today and working with us throughout the year. It's been an incredible year. I go back and I look at all the work that we have done, and I guess you could say the benefits that we have provided, the educational benefits and many other benefits that we have provided to our members, and in order to advance our mission. The leadership class, this was our inaugural leadership class gleam that we kicked off the Leadership Summit yesterday. It was a phenomenal, I shouldn't say we kicked it off, we kind of closed it out yesterday. It's been a whole year worth of Zooms and virtual get-together and blogs and things like that that we were able to communicate and learn from a leadership standpoint. But also yesterday was just an incredible networking on the key issues that not only the CEOs but our physician members and our society presidents end up impacting every day as they work through some of the critical issues that we're focusing in on. I must say it was a testament to have them all to work together and network and see how we have common interests or common areas that we need to focus on, but we also have some of those individual areas that we can each learn from each other about and maybe relate to some of the other critical aspects that we're looking at. But it also gave us an opportunity to see how so much of what the feedback that we got from our CEOs and our presidents being a focus group aligned so well with respect to our strategic plan. Incredible feedback, a lot of good work that we have to prioritize and align with our pillars. And that brings me to the incredible work that we did this year to look at our vision and mission statements, look at our strategic goals, look at our brand, and an incredible amount of work done over pretty much an 18-month period associated with your input with respect to a number of different surveys, working with consultants or consultant through that helped us through a number of different aspects, our retreat, our board retreat with many other CEOs being involved and engaged in that board retreat as well, and then ultimately coming out with a new vision, mission, and strategic pillars, and a new brand, a new logo and a new brand to really be the foundation, the kickoff for at least the next five years and to continue to build on what we have been able to do. I'm going to turn it over to Helen to kind of showcase a little bit of the brand that you've been seeing throughout the meeting here and let her, the incredible work that she has been doing as well as our CEO, to advance our organization collectively on behalf of specialty medicine, Helen. Thank you so much, Mike, really a pleasure to be here with you today. I know some of you who were in your PPGs got a little taste of what we shared in terms of the work we've been doing of putting together our new mission and vision, shared a bit of this with the folks who were at GLEAM yesterday, and we talked in a bit of detail this morning about our new strategic plan as part of the CEO Council, but we really just want to share this. This is, I think, an opportunity for us to share the CMSS story, where we are, and really where we're going, and I'm really delighted to get to share that with you. So first, this is our new mission statement, and I think it's great because it really, I think, expresses who we are, what we've been doing, and I think where we're going as well, and the idea here is that we advance the expertise and the collective voice of specialty societies in support of physicians and the patients they serve. It very much is, I think, what speaks to all of us as specialty societies and certainly speaks to us as the collective, as CMSS. And you've been seeing this logo around. It's interesting. We're still in this phase. We literally just got the logo delivered to us about two weeks ago, thanks to Julia and the team. You've got those lovely water bottles they gave you at registration, and we're sort of in this interested blended model of old logo and new logo today, but I just want to share with you a bit about this logo, which we really loved when it was shared with us, because it really is a logo that evokes our mission and our vision, and the idea here is those intersecting lines really are the idea that knowledge and our work and our collaboration and our expertise coming together as specialty societies, coming together to benefit the patient at the center, and that's the dot at the center. We really love this idea that both our mission and our vision always are at the idea that the benefit is, that it is all to the benefit of the patient at the center, and in all of our strategic planning and in all of our work, I'm really very proud of the fact that our board and everyone we talk to emphasize that for CMSS, the patient is our true north, and that was really very gratifying, made me know I was in the right place, and I hope it makes you feel like you're in the right place. So with that, that is our new logo at our recent staff retreat. We also sort of started grooving on the fact that it's also a bit of an interpretive dance as well, and it looks like it'll be a lovely pin for the future. So with that, I want to give you a bit of an overview, just a bit more detail about the, I shared the mission, the vision, very similarly, and that's the big posters you've seen around, that we, by working together, specialty societies help advance healthcare, again, for patients and physicians. Really importantly, we want to be able to do both by helping our physicians, and we also had a great discussion this morning in the CEO Council, we recognize a fair number of our societies are multidisciplinary. You do have physicians and nurses and other clinicians, and we really do recognize that over time, those words may change, it may be physicians and other health professionals, but for now, at least we've left it as physicians for now, but we really do recognize that it is very much the team. Our strategic priorities are those three listed there, you know, engage the community and building capacity, and that community is the community of specialty societies, and building capacity is both in building your capacity to do what you do well, but also building our collective capacity. You want to be able to share the learning of what you're all doing, sharing that innovation, and for many of you who, for example, I know we're going to be having the Diagnostic Excellence Summit at this meeting. For those of you who had the grants you've been able to give out, and the folks who've just gotten the grants from the Moore Foundation and the John A. Harford Foundation, you're going to get to share what you've been learning over the last year, share with others some of that innovation, and that's what we really see as a key part of that strategic pillar. And lastly, the ability to address critical issues together, and I can't think of a better example than the keynote we're going to have today to a specialty society. Everyone is trying to figure out what we're going to do in AI and ML. It is exactly one of those critical issues that we have to think about together, and it's a perfect example of what we can do. We then, below that, have a list of what are the key strategic objectives and our goals here, and there's a very detailed list that goes beneath each of these. But really the idea is that we want to be able to think about how we maximize the role and maximize the value and the excellence of our membership programs, or I would have memorized it by now, one would think, and that really is, for those of you who just came from your PPG meetings, those professional peer groups, our CEO council we just did. For example, one of the things we're going to be doing is we're going to be hiring a full-time member engagement and PPG person. We know that's one of the core, most important things. Thank you, Julia. And one of the most important things we have is Julia, my COO. Thank you, Julia. My old, tired eyes, but the ability to really make sure we can have those PPGs be as successful as they can. The GLEAM program I mentioned that Mike just mentioned, really making sure that's as successful as possible. We got to build on that. We got to build on the ideas of ways we can continue to make that an even better program going forward and expand to others. And then in addition to that, we've traditionally had these two meetings a year. We're really going to solidify and make this annual meeting the premier meeting for specialty societies. We just need to have one meeting. You know you have the one meeting a year, we'll get you all here in person and really make this the meeting for all specialty societies. So we're really excited about that. The second one, really strengthening partnerships and relationships to really to the benefit of the specialty society community. We've been doing a lot of work with some key partners, including patient groups, for example, who have very emerging and strong relationship, for example, with the National Health Council who represents our sister societies of all the patient groups, for example. Fostering relationships with funders, like I mentioned, the Gordon Betty Moore Foundation, Hartford Foundation, others who see the opportunity to come to CMSS to provide that one to many funding, right? They come to us and then we can share funding with all of you. And then really thinking about what is our role in terms of policy and advocacy. Continuing to build our connections and influence across health care. How do we think about what are those big issues and how do we work across our members? What is meaningful engagement with your volunteer physician and other leaders as we did with GLEAM and otherwise? Thinking about how we specifically demonstrate your engagement and advancement of health care and how we could help there. And then finally, the last one is very more inwardly focused. As we've continued to grow and build, how do we make sure we're doing it in a way that really ensures we're building that strong foundation for member value as we've done with this new branding, for example? But building our team, building a really strong industry partner strategy, and thank you for the industry partners who are here with us today and really thinking through our new member growth strategy and really proud that we have two new members from up to 53 members today. And I think welcome to one of our new members who's here today, Amda, and really welcome them to our family. So really just in summary before we sort of close this out, really as we thought about putting this all together, really working together, we, as our vision said, we advance health care for patients and physicians. We provide that community that allows us to learn from one another, a chance to hear diverse viewpoints, address critical issues across specialties. We accelerate the skills and the impact of our society leaders and staff through our peer groups, through education, training, through mentorship. We can amplify the influence and the reach of our specialty societies by speaking with a unified voice when it's appropriate, by having, you know, on the essential topics where it makes sense in science and medicine and public health, and whenever possible, connecting you with what those research and funding opportunities are, connecting you with the right clinical patient coalitions, as well as public and private partnerships. And then lastly, who we are. We're currently 53 organizations representing over 800,000 physicians. And we really do believe in the unique role of what specialty societies bring to the table, which is high quality evidence based health care accessible to all. Power of a diverse, shared learning community, a unified voice, an expansive perspective. And then lastly, as you see these signs around our meeting, take some pictures in front of it, post it on social media, hashtag stronger together, CMSS 2023, because we really do believe that by having all of us working together on these same issues, we can make health care better together. So we're delighted to have you as part of our journey. And we really do believe we are stronger together. So thank you.

CMSS Annual Meeting

specialty societies

collaboration

new logo

strategic priorities