Michigan HIMSS Interest Group
Minutes from
Meeting Friday, October 24, 2003
Strategic
Planning Meeting
If you cannot attend the bimonthly planning
meetings in person, please call in!
These meetings are held on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. The toll free dial in number is: (866) 680-0146. Enter the participant code of 297455. Our host is Helen Hill.
Attending: Helen Hill, Ron Wheelock, Ken Risko, Jan Cepiga, Elaine Roach, Jennifer Horowitz, Chris Holden, Rick Wilkening, Satish Nagarajan, Gary Strelecki.
Today’s meeting was held in-person from 12-4 pm at Reliance Software Systems in Farmington Hills. General discussion continued and introductions were made as we enjoyed lunch together.
Alicia welcomed everyone and opened the meeting with an overview of the meeting objectives.
The
meeting began with the following agenda:
- Opening Remarks, Introductions, Review of Agenda
- Review of Minutes from June Strategic Planning Session
- Goals and Objectives for 2003 - 2004
- Setting Calendar for Year
- Requirements for National
- Major Themes
- Regional Rotation
- Dates and Places
- Organizational Review
- Current Organization Structure
- Challenges, Opportunities
- Expanding Participation in Organization
- Getting Committees and Making Them Active
- Succession Planning
- Regional Advisory Council – Roles, Activities, Recruitment
- Discussion
Adjournment
MI-HIMSS Research Liaison, Jennifer Horowitz presented information about opportunities where HIMSS National and the Ann Arbor office could assist the chapter. She detailed various studies occurring at the national level.
Some minutes are missing from this portion of the meeting, because Alicia was out of the room. Jennifer graciously presented her information despite interruptions.
President’s Report - Future Programs
HISA has approached us to co-sponsor a combined event with them in early December. The event would be a holiday mixer in the evening. The proposed speaker is Dr. Kimberly Wisdom, the new Michigan Surgeon General. She is on the staff at Henry Ford Health System. This is the first time the state has had a Surgeon General.
In case Dr. Wisdom is not available, we wondered what others HISA considered could be brought in as speaker, but no firm suggestions. Pam and Craig of HISA invited us to participate in a call with them next week to discuss this further. We determined that we would talk to HISA in that phone meeting next Tuesday at 5 pm. Contact information will come from HISA to the group.
The event would be held in SE Michigan. HISA’s focus is in this geographical area. Their preferred program location is at the MSU Conference Center in Troy. There will be vendor participation, which will help offset speaker fees.
Discussion continued regarding the program. It was stated that it may be more difficult to entice vendors in an evening format because there is less “browse” time. Ron felt that our evening program last year was effective from the vendor’s perceptions. We will begin to engage some of our key vendors to see if they would have interest in an evening program.
ACTION ITEM: Alicia will call Sharon Massey at Microsoft regarding sponsorship.
The group speculated about HISA and HIMSS ultimately melding into one organization. There are advantages for both groups because of the manpower it brings to each. HISA’s primary focus is HIT programs.
Membership Report
Rick provided a membership update to the group as well as introducing Satish as the proposed new member of the Membership Committee. Membership grew steadily since Q3, 2002. Membership numbers for the Michigan chapter are as follows:
Q3, 2002 233
Q4, 2002 257
Q1, 2003 280
Q2, 2003 314
Q3, 2003 251
The group discussed possible reasons for the decline of membership in Q3 in 2003. By reviewing the trend it appears that it has to do with a slow renewal rate once memberships expire in July. We expect the upward trend demonstrated in 2002 to continue in 2003.
In 2002 we saw spikes at both the national HIMSS and MI-HIMSS fall events.
The highest renewal months are June and July. We gained almost 130 members in that time in 2003. The renewals occur primarily as basic memberships, with CHIME participants the second highest population. Thirty of our members are CHIME members. The group identified that some corporate members get complimentary CHIME memberships.
The lowest population of growth is with students. We would like to stimulate student involvement in the local chapter and will discuss that further. Our chapter has six out of state members!
In-state memberships are distributed through the following area codes in rank order:
734, 248, 313, 616, 519, 810, 231, 586, 989, 906, and 269. Southeast Michigan is by far the heaviest population, but there is distribution across the state.
The group wondered what the potential base is within Michigan? Also, what percent of the total potential memberships is the 254 for the state? From the whole potential population, this would be a very small percentage. We would have to check against national numbers to see if there are any differences between their Michigan population and ours.
What percentage of conference participants are HIMSS members? We were unsure but agreed that is would be 70 – 80%. As our HISA discussion came up again, we speculated that HISA could become the SE Michigan HIMSS Regional Advisory Council. They may be receptive to exploring this option. We are not sure how National would feel, or if they would have any concerns.
Review of Minutes
Alicia reviewed with the group the notes from the June Strategic planning session.
Strategic Planning Discussion
In reviewing the notes, Ron acknowledged that we should group and identify the items on the list and assign action items. Helen’s concern was that undertaking all of these items were too large for the size of our organization, even though there were a number of good ideas. We determined that if we prioritize the items that will help guide us, now that we have a list to work from.
We are still struggling to get additional support. Our struggle is communications and getting the word out effectively. A general concern was noted about keeping up the current executive board to ensure capability of the chapter. Jennifer noted that there are a number of task forces and more Michiganders involved at the National level. We can see if anyone from Michigan that is primarily participating at the National level would like more involvement locally.
How does a group this size effectively tackle the issues at hand? We don’t know who the new officers will be, so how do we ensure an effective hand-off? Established chapters should have elections every April. One approach could be to keep terms staggered so we would not all leave at the same time.
We have a new National HIMSS liaison, replacing Susan Delhey. She is Nancy Wedell. Nancy is the new Program Manager and Maggie Suerth is the Member Relations Coordinator. They are also involved in some SIG groups.
The discussion moved to improving communication. The group admitted that we needed involvement in this area. The web site needs energy.
Jennifer would like us to review the requirements for National. Helen will talk about an organizational review to help set the stage. We have a requirement to have a Communication Program Chair. The job is too big for one person. If we break it up and have one person responsible for publicity and one person for the newsletter, this will help. Also, beefing up involvement from any would help. We need to engage lots of people to ensure the many tasks will be achievable.
To engage more people, the group wondered if we could offer incentives like free attendance at conferences and still make money? It was agreed that this would be next to impossible. So, what about offering discounts? The objective is not to make money but to be able to always cover our conference costs.
Jennifer generously volunteered her time to work on the newsletter and be a chair, but admitted that she doesn’t have web site experience. It was suggested that we could engage Mike McGill, IT director of Walsh College. If someone on the committee could organize a group of students to get support, that could help.
At a higher level, if we establish roles and responsibilities for each position and committee so everyone understands the expectations, that will help set direction. It wasa felt that we need to be more formal to get more involvement.
In furthering involvement, we opened up discussion on the need for filling officer positions. A two year commitment is pretty heavy for a Vice President who is supposed to ascend to President. As is typical in other chapters, a VP or Treasurer will ascend to President, and spend three years involved as Vice President, President and Past President.
The ideal would be that the President’s involvement be 5-10 hours per month. Other officer and board roles should be less than that. This is based on projected work hours from other chapters.
We admitted it is good to have continuity, but two years is a long time. We could overlap positions in two separate terms: January to January and June to June.
Elaine wondered if co-chairs would be best to help off-set workload. It was acknowledged that additional financial people would help around conference time. We admitted we need to get much more involvement on committees.
The goal is clearly to get more people involved, but how? One way is to get more information on the web site. Is this sufficient? It is helpful, but not the only way. We need to reach out more. One way that was suggested is to send emails to try to engage the whole Michigan membership. The group determined that they would continue to engage the working group through email and for planning meetings, and instead of reaching out through email, would reach out individually.
Jan has someone that may volunteer their time to support the web site. Gary also knows someone. They will each pursue the volunteers.
Committees should also establish standing meetings to help get involvement. This can be posted at the web site and emailed to engage all members. If we structure items and to-dos under the committees so we know when we are trying to involve people. They can indicate their area of interest under each committee.
The group voted Jennifer as the new Communications Chairperson. Jan will co-chair Communications with Jennifer. The bylaws lay out the Chair and Committee responsibilities.
Helen wondered if Elaine would want to be Vice President. Elaine said that she would agree if the Vice President did not succeed to President. We would have to modify our by-laws to enable this. The process is that we suggest this and publish it to our membership for feedback. The current requirement is to succeed to President from some position on the board. That person has to be a member for a minimum of one year. Elaine agreed to be the interim Vice President until we sort out the details and structure for the future of this position.
Thanks and congratulations to these new board members!
We have used a booth at various local conferences to increase membership, but have not provided committee information. This may help get detailed needs out. We can broadcast what we do and what the committees need. The group wondered who from previous surveys expressed interest. Alicia and Rick have older surveys. They will review surveys for people who have expressed interest and where that interest lies.
ACTION ITEM: Alicia and Rick will review surveys for people who have expressed interest in involvement and SIG involvement.
Committee chairs could analyze needs based on the bylaws and present who they need at the next meetings. This would include skill sets and objectives. Additional interest has been expressed by Gary Strelecki, Judie Hetsler, Lucy Newell and people from First Consulting Group. We also need to work to get people from big industrial firms and engage their support. This would include Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others of this stature. We get great sponsorships from our vendors, but want to leverage their involvement even more.
Regarding the newsletter, the group determined that we should maintain a neutral content as far as vendors are concerned. That is nothing should be too vendor specific.
Helen gets contacted regarding interest in job positions. She refers people to the HIMSS Job Mine. Part of communications can be to set up parameters so people know what to expect in job submissions, etc. Jennifer will get us the new bylaws. There was a new publication of them in June 2003.
ACTION ITEM: Jennifer will get us the new bylaws.
Ron feels as Chairs of committees, they should lay out a strategy for direction to bring to the board. Then we would approve the final strategy. This is important because of the “multidisciplinary” aspect of each committee. Programs for example involves many people: programs, finance, membership, education, logistics, etc. Ron will put together a skeleton and submit it to the group.
Other ideas that were contributed include these. We could potentially evolve to have an events committee that is a subset of the program committee. Future meetings could have break-outs to separate and get more productive. We could have separate committee meetings vs. board meetings—these meetings could alternate within the month. This may allow the group to better focus on work.
Helen would like to see formal progress reports from the Committee Chairs. This will help make the process more formal to better engage people. This allows us also to respond with resources.
ACTION ITEM: Committee Chairs will prepare formal progress notes for future meetings.
We should publish the 2004 goals and objectives that we derive from our meetings. For example, these could be published in a quarterly newsletter. We can talk about our accomplishments and plans. The sooner we can have this in place, the sooner we could publish it and be proactive.
We will derive a list of targeted members from the SIG groups. We should report at each meeting if we are able to put enough people together. We will add the SIG Chairs from National to our mailing lists. It would be interesting to know how often they are meeting. The SIGs have active list servers to help them share data.
ACTION ITEM: Rick will put together a member spreadsheet and turn it into a mail merge in Word. This would allow labels to be routinely used from updated email lists.
Elaine is RAC coordinator in the Northern Michigan area. Karen Hollingsworth is supporting Mid-Michigan. As with other involvement in the chapter, this takes additional time. Karen has commitments that are making it increasingly difficult for her to maintain this position. What are the roles and responsibilities of the RAC? Primarily it is to get the people in the region active—to be the “big nag.” Helen and Elaine will work on collaboration on identifying the goals of the RAC and will provide them back to the group.
ACTION ITEM: Helen and Elaine will work on collaboration on identifying the goals of the RAC and will provide them back to the group.
A goal will be to fill the vacancies in the RAC. Gary will work with Elaine to generate ideas of good people. They will work together also to define the role of the RAC.
There are many ways to get involvement and we will pursue these. The action items are in the list below.
ACTION ITEMS:
Generate lists of interested people from surveys (Alicia, Rick)
Provide lists of everyone who has attended previous conferences and send them to the working group. (Ken)
Provide lists of every sponsor from previous conferences (Ken/Dave)
Generate speaker lists
Use vendor/participation lists to drive information in the newsletters, etc.
All these should be sent to Alicia for archiving/storage purposes (All)
ACTION ITEM: To make changes in our
mission statement, we will need the membership to vote. This will be investigated as we move
forward.
ACTION ITEM: All of us will develop plans and goals for the organization.
ACTION ITEM: Ron will work on a rough calendar of events for future programs.
ACTION ITEM: Alicia will draft an overall document on building a program/conference. Ron had created a checklist earlier, this can be used as the template for a larger document.
It was discussed that a Regional Spring program be considered. For this spring event, we can seek out Gale Warden and/or Tommy Thompson. National is very interested in the concept. Funding for National Health Initiatives.
We could partner with other local groups such as Northern Ohio or Chicago to develop regional programs. There has been an interest expressed in collaborating on programs. Indiana is interested in working with us. Localizing the work can improve interest.
ACTION ITEM: For the newsletter, Alicia will send headers (logos) to Jennifer.
ACTION ITEM: Chris will follow up on CEU work with Jennifer to get more information.
HISA gives CEU credits. CEUs go toward HIMSS CPM certification. The HIMSS accreditation policy for chapters is somewhat relaxed. We can advertise CEUs on the web site. Nursing CEUs are more complicated, but possible. A nursing informatics symposium will be part of HIMSS in February. HIMSS has surveyed their nursing informatics members and member organizations to gather their interest. The survey will be open for another week.
Jennifer is our Research Liaison, but we also want her involvement in communications. We don’t want to overload her. However, HIMSS has so much research information that we could really benefit from it.
We continued discussion on ways to improve the web site and communication. We could solicit white papers from Michigan people. We would prefer to exclude vendors to avoid any biases. We could also include web logging at the web site. The “BLOG” could allow users to annotate articles as the site indexes the information. This promotes constant change at the web site and may help bring people to the site more consistently. We are looking for a way to build a strong community and keep the content fresh.
We still need to identify a person to be the Michigan Advocacy Liaison.
We need to investigate additional certification programs. We should look at not only what HIMSS offers, but AHIMA and other organizations as well.
Someone raised the notion of making sure we had insurance coverage for our events. Ken will talk to Pauline at HIMSS regarding insuring our events. Helen will send contact information to Ken.
ACTION ITEM: Ken will talk to Pauline at HIMSS regarding insuring our events. Helen will send contact information to Ken.
We should work to make ourselves aware of the events that could give discounts to HIMSS members and post this at the web site. We also need to maintain a calendar of events for the year at the web site and for our own information.
Do we want vendors to link to our web site? Possibly. We should talk about it further and check with National.
What about chapter sponsorship at a high level? We have talked about this, but never pursued it. HIMSS National is very careful about their vendor relationships. We will look carefully at the vendor relationship and linking to the web site, etc.
ACTION ITEM: Set up email for Michigan HIMSS. Jennifer and Jan will work on this. Emails should be set up by title not name, so the emails don’t change, just who they are redirected to. For example president@mi-himss.org, programchair@mi-himss.org…
Communications should have a web master and also one other person to manage the Telusys site and the relationship with Telusys. We would like to develop a protected spot on the web site to give us information on how to process these things. We should follow up with Telusys and Jim Brown, former Communications Chair to determine everything that Telusys has to offer.
ACTION ITEM: Before the next conference we will review all the Telusys functionality to be sure it is appropriate for registration.
For the proposed HISA/HIMSS conference, we will plan to take registrations at both web sites. We will need to work out the logistics of this with HISA, such as distribution of funds, etc. We will propose a 50/50 distribution of funds from the conference to start. We will work to get vendors to donate prizes as well as sponsor.
Ken acknowledged we need one process. He suggested that everyone register at Telusys. Ken will be the registration coordinator. We have additional overhead of the cost of Telusys. Would HISA be willing to help cover that overhead, the 4-6% additional cost of registration? We will talk to them about this.
Additional next steps include: we will develop a schedule that will be consistent month to month, we will identify the time period for renewal of officers and will identify all work that occurs annually or consistently such as our programs.
We received some bad feedback regarding Shanty Creek, specifically regarding rooms. While we like the idea of a summer conference up north, we want to have a location that is pleasing to everyone. Some alternate suggestions include: TreeTops, Grand Traverse, near Harbor Springs or Crystal Mountain.
Everyone will follow up on their action items and we will reconvene specifically on strategic planning once the December event is completed.
Suggestions for Future Agenda Items
MI-HIMSS Supermarket. This would be a mini-exposition of Michigan vendors. We would group by technology, which is where the Supermarket concept comes from—for example, CPOE vendors are in one area, EMR vendors in another, Security is in another, etc. We would bring in vendors and allow them to present separately, perhaps even a technology face-off, as well as provide the expo. We expressed some concern regarding HIMSS National feelings about this type of event.
HIMSS Speaker Assistance Program.
Meetings
Meetings are held the second and fourth Tuesday of each month.
Upcoming meetings include:
Cancelled - Tuesday, October 28
Next planning meetings:
Tuesday, November 11
Tuesday, November 25
Tuesday, December 9
Tuesday, December 23
Meeting Locations
Our meetings are currently held by phone or
at Reliance Software Systems, 30500 Northwestern Highway, Suite 415, Farmington
Hills. Main phone: 248-865-7850 or
877-735-9273.
Reliance is on the north side of Northwestern
between Inkster and 13 Mile Road in the North Valley Office Building.
|
From
the North:
Take Telegraph (US24) South to 13 Mile Road. Turn right (West) on 13 mile to
Northwestern (M10). Make a "Michigan Left" onto Northwestern,
heading South-East. You will see our building on the left (East). |
30500 Northwestern Highway
If you need to contact someone for directions
or information, contact Alicia Brown at 248-496-4983 (cell) or Reliance
Software Systems at 248-865-7850 or 877-735-9273.
Please participate. If you can’t attend in person, dial in!
Toll Free Dial in Number: (866)680-0146
PARTICIPANT CODE: 297455
Host: Helen Hill