Public Policy

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SHM Launches New Grassroots Advocacy Tool

Grassroots involvement by SHM members is critical to our ability to influence health policy in Washington. That is why SHM has launched a powerful new advocacy tool designed to help you communicate quickly and effectively with your congressional representatives. Capwiz·XC, located in the “Advocacy” section of our Web site, enables you to take action on any issue important to hospital medicine by sending personalized communications to your elected officials.

Advocacy doesn’t have to require a big time commitment. Communicating with your representatives in Congress now takes just a few minutes at SHM’s Legislative Action Center. You can send an e-mail whenever it is convenient for you, and our action alerts contain sample text for you to use and personalize as desired. Physician payment reform, quality improvement, palliative care, and funding levels for the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality are just a few of the many issues before the 110th Congress. You can help influence the debate, improve patient care, and increase the visibility of hospitalists by making your voice heard through Capwiz.

Capwiz has many other features that will help keep you informed and educated about the legislative process. These include an interactive map to help you find your elected officials. Simply enter your ZIP code or click on your state to find out who your elected officials are. From there, you can easily select one of the listed state or congressional officials to see the full legislative biography page. Each bio page includes direct links you can use to contact the legislator, look up his or her key votes, and find staff contact information. You’ll also find a plethora of information about each elected representative, including:

  • Office term;
  • Co-sponsorship status;
  • Contact information;
  • Party affiliation;
  • Political background;
  • Committee(s); and
  • PAC contributions.

Are you interested in looking up a piece of legislation recently mentioned in the news? Or do you want to monitor the various bills that will affect issues important to your practice? The “Legislative Action Center” in the “Advocacy” section contains “Issues and Legislation” to help you to stay on top of current legislation affecting healthcare. Keep track of any bill’s name, summary, co-sponsor(s), and key votes, while also monitoring SHM’s position on the legislation.

SHM is pleased to provide you with the opportunity to become more familiar with the political process and actively participate in influencing the policies that affect hospitalists and their patients. Capwiz contains up-to-the-minute legislative data and online tools to enable you to make a difference in the political process. Please visit our Legislative Action Center today at www.hospitalmedicine.org. TH

SHM: BEHIND THE SCENES

A Closer Look at SHM’s Mission

By Joe Miller

Earlier this year, as I entered my second year in the position of senior vice president of SHM, my boss, Larry Wellikson, MD, asked me to take the lead in organizing a Senior Staff Planning Summit. The Summit was held in late August 2006.

In preparing for the Summit, I sought a framework that would help to guide a meaningful discussion among the participants. At first I turned to the SHM Mission Statement and Goals:

SHM mission statement: SHM is dedicated to promoting the highest quality care for all hospitalized patients. SHM is committed to promoting excellence in the practice of hospital medicine through education, advocacy, and research.

SHM goals:

  • To promote high-quality care for all hospitalized patients;
  • To promote education and research in hospital medicine;
  • To promote teamwork to achieve the best possible care for hospitalized patients;
  • To advocate a career path that will attract and retain the highest quality hospitalists;
  • To define the competencies, activities, and needs of the hospitalist community; and
  • To support, propose, and promote changes to the healthcare system that lead to higher quality and more efficient care for all hospitalized patients.

Although these were helpful, I did not feel they gave sufficient guidance to a planning session that would focus on specific programs, operational activities, and initiatives. I decided to concentrate on the “needs” that SHM attempts to address (see “Why SHM Exists,” below) and realized that our society exists to serve two masters: hospitalists as individuals and hospitalists as a group (the hospital medicine specialty):

  • Hospitalists: SHM exists to meet the needs of individuals with regard to education, facts and news, career satisfaction, networking with peers, and the provision of resources and services.
  • Hospital medicine specialty: Our specialty is just 10 years old. SHM exists to help define the specialty, track its growth and development, promote our accomplishments, develop leaders, advocate for public policy, encourage research and scholarly pursuits, and encourage innovation. We also seek to represent the diversity of hospital medicine, recognizing the unique roles of both community-based and academic hospitalists.

To address these needs, SHM has a first-rate staff that delivers service, develops products and programs, and manages projects. You have met the senior members of that group in this column (Geri Barnes, director of education and Quality Initiatives; Steve Poitras, director of business operations; Scott Johnson, director of information services; and Todd Von Deak, director of membership and marketing). We also have a group of consultants who provide exceptional expertise in specialty areas: Laura Allendorf (Advocacy and Public Policy), Tina Budnitz (Quality Initiatives), Kathleen Kerr (Research), and Bob Lane (Information Systems).

There is another critical asset, however, that propels SHM forward with new ideas and hard work. We have a highly motivated group of volunteer members who work on our board of directors, committees, and task forces. The broad range of that participation is also depicted in the diagram.

This SHM team of staff and volunteers addresses the needs of both individual hospitalists and the hospital medicine specialty as a group. The broad range of products and initiatives offered by SHM are represented as the last element of the diagram.

This framework proved to be an extremely useful tool for conducting our Senior Staff Planning Summit in August. I hope it is also useful to you, our members, in understanding the work we do on your behalf. If any of you have questions, please contact me by phone: (215) 351-2465.

Miller is the senior vice president of SHM.

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