The CMS Board of Directors met on Friday, Sept. 19, to approve the 2014-2015 work plan. And the CMS House of Delegates convened on Saturday, Sept. 20 and Sunday, Sept. 21 to deliberate on four resolutions and many issues of great importance to the physicians and patients of Colorado. The House elected new leaders and witnessed the launch of the new physician wellness toolkit. Please see more below. We encourage you to contact us any time about the actions of the board or the House. Your comments are important to us!

The CMS Board of Directors adopted an ambitious 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 plan is directly tied to the CMS strategic plan - which was updated earlier in the year and approved by the HOD at this Annual Meeting - and, where noted, previous BOD and HOD actions.

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.

Internally, it outlines how CMS intends 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 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.

"The scope of work embodied in the fiscal year 2014-2015 work plan of the CMS Board of Directors is an understatement of what is ahead of us over the coming year. The plan speaks for itself in terms of content and logic. In this time of market disruptions and realignments, our priorities have been deliberatively and methodically developed from the grassroots and our component organizations."

This plan will take medicine's voice into Colorado's executive suites, the legislative and executive branches of state government, and into the judiciary, if needed, on our behalf. We invite you to review the plan and welcome your input and participation.

Click here to read the work plan.

Thank you to all the delegates who participated in the thoughtful discussions on resolutions and policies on governance, Medicaid specialty access, workers' compensation innovation, and telemedicine, among others.

By far, the majority of debate was about proposed governance reforms. Delegates approved four of the five recommendations submitted by the CMS board of directors and approved the creation of a board task force to develop implementation plans for each of the recommendations.

Click here to read the final disposition of resolutions and reports, which includes the recommendations for governance reform.

The House of Delegates elected new leaders. Delegates selected Michael Volz, MD, a board certified allergy/immunology specialist, to be CMS president-elect; re-elected W. Gerald Rainer, MD, as historian; 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. The House also re-elected us -- Robert Yakely, MD, and Brigitta Robinson, MD -- as your HOD speaker and vice speaker.

Click here to view the full nominating report.

Delegates heard a presentation on a new resource, the "DIMENSIONS: Work and Well-Being Toolkit for Physicians," a wellness toolkit developed over the past year by the CMS Expert Panel on Physician Wellness and the Behavioral Health and Wellness Program (BHWP) at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. CMS recognizes that healthy doctors live longer, lead more satisfying lives and are safer practitioners. The toolkit addresses the eight dimensions of wellness with a focus on stress and burnout.

Click here to download the toolkit. It 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.

• May 1-3, 2015 - CMS Spring Conference - Vail, Colo.
• Sept. 18-20, 2015 - CMS Annual Meeting - Breckenridge, Colo.