More than 200 physicians and medical students from around the state attended the 144th Colorado Medical Society Annual Meeting in Vail in September. "Carnival in the Mountains" featured fun and fellowship, interactive programming and education, and policy-making and elections.

Highlights:

• The CMS Board of Directors met Friday afternoon to review the activities of CMS in fiscal year 2014-2015 and adopt a work plan that provides consensus on activities and allows the physician leadership and staff to hit the ground running following the Annual Meeting. 
• The House of Delegates convened to deliberate on four resolutions and set policy on governance, Medicaid specialty access, workers' compensation innovation, telemedicine, and more.
• The House of Delegates also elected new leaders and presented awards. They selected Michael Volz, MD, a board certified allergy/immunology specialist, to be CMS president-elect; re-elected Lee Morgan, MD, as delegate to the American Medical Association; and selected Katie Lozano, MD, as alternate delegate to the American Medical Association. Elisabeth Arenales, of the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, was honored with the Tip of the Spear Award for her work to create the Colorado Commission on Affordable Health Care.
• Attendees participated in interactive sessions on scope of practice, the State Innovation Model, and physician wellness.
• Attendees enjoyed various social events including a Carnival-themed Exhibitors reception with live music, giveaways and a photo booth; and the President's Gala, with dinner, dancing, entertainment, and the installation of 2014-2015 CMS President Tamaan Osbourne-Roberts, MD.

Watch for more extensive coverage of the meeting in the November/December issue of Colorado Medicine.

The Colorado Medical Society and its Expert Panel on Physician Wellness have spent the last year tackling the goal of improving physician wellness and reducing burnout in recognition that healthy doctors live longer, lead more satisfying lives and are safer practitioners. A crucial partner in the effort are the experts at the Behavioral Health and Wellness Program (BHWP) at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who developed a toolkit specifically tailored to physicians to address the eight dimensions of wellness with a focus on stress and burnout.

Chad Morris, PhD, BHWP program director, and Cindy Morris, PsyD, BHWP clinical director, presented the toolkit at the annual meeting. Physician burnout is a response to facing significant job stressors over a long period of time, they said. Individuals feel cynical or depersonalized, experience prolonged emotional exhaustion, or find it difficult to perform well and feel accomplished at work and home. Among various professions in the United States, physicians experience the highest and most significant levels of burnout. And, notably, among physicians with the lowest levels of well-being, most believed their well-being was at or above average levels.

"DIMENSIONS: Work and Well-Being Toolkit for Physicians" is designed specifically for physicians and contains education regarding the importance of maintaining overall wellness, step-by-step instructions for developing skills to assess one's overall wellness and identify goals to further promote wellness, a low-burden means of assessing readiness to change related to increasing wellness behaviors, and evidence-based strategies for improving wellness.

Click here to download the toolkit.

CMS's organizational excellence goal statement states that CMS will be a well governed, effectively managed, fiscally sound organization that meets the needs of a diverse membership in a rapidly changing environment. Striving to meet this goal statement, the CMS Board of Directors met on Friday, Sept. 19 to review the activities of CMS in fiscal year 2014-2015 and adopt a work plan for the upcoming year. The plan will continually evolve to incorporate direction by the House of Delegates and to adapt to new situations and opportunities as they arise.

The work plan is directly tied to the CMS strategic plan - which was updated earlier in the year and approved by the House of Delegates at the Annual Meeting - and, where noted, previous BOD and HOD actions. 

Internally, the work plan outlines how we intend to upgrade and repurpose communications to our physician constituencies, streamline our administrative and governance functions, and boost our outreach to medical students and other component societies. Externally, the plan top-lines how we intend to engage and respond to the game-changing issues already in play - Medicaid Reform, repealing the SGR, and maintaining our relatively stable liability climate - and those that are coming online, such as Colorado's new Commission on Affordable Health Care and the federally grant funded initiative to integrate physical and behavioral health.

"Veterans of this extraordinary work on behalf of medicine understand that the words on these pages don't convey what will be required of our advocates and volunteer physician leaders in terms of grace, magnanimity, diplomacy, risk taking, and consensus building under both internal and external pressure," said CMS President Tamaan Osbourne-Roberts, MD.

During the meeting in Vail, the board broke into three groups to discuss in detail physician well-being and success, health care systems evolution, and organizational excellence. For each work plan item, members reviewed the proposed goal, the proposed objective and the proposed strategy, and then assigned a level of importance. They presented each item to the full board and approved the plan.

Click here to view the draft 2014-2015 work plan; the final plan will be available soon.

Physician practices of 10 or more eligible professionals must act before Sept. 30, 2014 to avoid a payment decrease under the Value-Based Payment Modifier. Click here to read more in a bulletin on the Colorado Medical Society's website. Also click here to read more in the September/October issue of Colorado Medicine.