Abstract
As a President Emeritus of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA), I'm pleased to have this opportunity to congratulate Ronald C. Merrell, MD, FACS, FATA, and Charles R. Doarn, MBA, FATA, the outstanding Co-Editors-in-Chief of Telemedicine and e-Health Journal; the journal's editorial board; and Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., Publishers, on the 20th anniversary of this high-value healthcare journal. Telemedicine and e-Health Journal continues to contribute significantly to the growing reputation and awareness of telemedicine and e-health as important areas for academic scholarship. Many of the studies it publishes provide a solid foundation of evidence for medical practices leveraging the benefits of healthcare delivery using telemedicine technologies. The quality of this publishing enterprise is high and casts its glow over the entire telemedicine field, for which we, the telemedicine professional and academic community, are indebted.
Becoming a first-rate journal in a new field of scholarship can provide a host of opportunities as well as challenges. In order to accurately represent and explain telemedicine's evolution, which involved the introduction of a series of individual technological advances, Telemedicine and e-Health Journal needed to constantly adjust to the new realities brought into play by innovations often coming from multiple disciplines, while simultaneously respecting both the standards of medicine and the technological traditions of times past and anticipating future technological breakthroughs. Many balls are in the air at the same time during the formative phases of the development of a new class of healthcare delivery system, even before later-stage challenges to the field become known. Continually refining the priorities for a journal is a process that demands the disciplined attention of finely tuned minds, eyes, and ears and the collective willpower among the Editors and the Editorial Board members to get things done right, over and over again. Merrell and Doarn have now proven that they were up to the task of carrying Telemedicine and e-Health Journal vision and mission forward.
On this occasion of the 20th anniversary of Telemedicine and e-Health Journal, it is instructive to dissect and understand Telemedicine and e-Health Journal's current leadership structure, with two Editors-in-Chief. I'll do that, intentionally, in the context of the larger medical publishing industry. Ultimately, this is a success story.
The general wisdom in the medical publishing industry is that Co-Editors-in-Chief arrangements, like the one we currently have with Merrell and Doarn sharing the helm, have limped along or failed, with notable exceptions. When I first was queried about the Merrell–Doarn proposal to implement Co-Editors-in-Chief, I was skeptical. I was, however, willing to give the Merrell–Doarn team a shot at taking this on together, given their individual exemplary work in the telemedicine field spanning many years. Now, having seen how well this has turned out, I wonder if the Merrell–Doarn Co-Editors-in-Chief arrangement might become the model for other healthcare journals, given the new heights the Journal has achieved under their dual editorial leadership.
Let's examine the Telemedicine and e-Health Journal editorial leadership model more closely. What can we learn from the notable successes of its two Editors-in-Chief? Is the current Merrell–Doarn Telemedicine and e-Health Journal success story an anomaly? Is their current success based on factors beyond their control? For example, to what extent do their successes represent a straightforward, seamless extension of the outstanding leadership of their immediate predecessor in the Editor-in-Chief position, Rashid L. Bashshur, PhD? Bashshur is clearly one of a kind, a towering giant in the telemedicine scholarship world for nearly half a century. Bashshur personally wedged telemedicine into its current slot as a legitimate area for academic scholarship. This is an amazing accomplishment, even for a strong-willed visionary.
Obviously, Bashshur's role in developing Telemedicine and e-Health Journal is a factor for discussion concerning the Telemedicine and e-Health Journal's Editors-in-Chief positions. However, there is more complexity to the story.
Personally, as a close observer of the situation, I think that Merrell and Doarn have actually taken Telemedicine and e-Health Journal to a higher level than can be explained by editorial momentum alone. I've seen a new infusion of creativity and the addition of new perspectives that have further enhanced the journal.
What I've seen is that Merrell and Doarn are successfully building new layers upon the Bashshur scholarship-rich foundation they inherited. They are succeeding in bringing added value to the Editor-in-Chief position, leveraging their own special skill sets to do it. By maintaining Bashshur's high standards for judging manuscripts for publication in Telemedicine and e-Health Journal, they are constantly honoring the Bashshur era.
Although Telemedicine and e-Health Journal is a serious academic journal, let me speculate further on the nature of the “magic” that Merrell and Doarn brought to their shared Editor position. An interesting topic is, what makes great editors? What are the ingredients of the Merrell–Doarn “secret sauce” for success as Co-Editors-in-Chief?
Those ingredients may be hard to rank in terms of their order of importance, but might include the blending of intellectual interests of strong-minded individuals, the sharing of different education and job experiences, and, hopefully, a mountain of mutual respect. Sure, Merrell and Doarn did come into this shared role with a common interest in telemedicine, and they are both bright and have exemplary work ethics. They are “can do” people. Their tenacious skills for handling the minutiae pouring into a busy editorial office every day build confidence in the seriousness of the enterprise, both internally within the organization and externally among the authors and their readership. Their steady outpourings of optimism are frosting on the cake. In addition, each brings his own special qualities to their shared editorship.
First, with Merrell, I think that the same inner engine that likely energized his success as a master academic surgeon now energizes his sense of mission for telemedicine. As medical students, we used to say, “If you go to a surgeon, you'll get an operation.” Merrell sees telemedicine as a solution to an abundance of problems in the healthcare world but never oversells it as a “cure-all” for healthcare disparities. Merrell's commitment to the science behind telemedicine, especially coming from a highly respected and accomplished surgeon, is inherently a reassuring message for other doctors.
Personality factors do come into play in defining an editor's successes. Some surgeons rule by overwhelming. Not so with Merrell. When I'm with Merrell, I instantly sense I'm on the right team, and everyone gets a turn to speak and listen. Merrell likes people while enjoying his spot at the helm of the Telemedicine and e-Health Journal editorial ship. It turns out that this is a fine juxtaposition of traits. As a career-long pathologist myself, with hundreds of surgeon colleagues through the years, I wouldn't bet on it being easy to duplicate a Merrell. His humanism and team approach might be hard to match. And, quite possibly, he's actually one of a kind.
Doarn also is a personable manager who brings other valuable strengths to the editorial team. Nearly a decade and a half younger than Merrell, Doarn is a mid-career MBA with a very impressive stack of professional accomplishments to his credit. Although many academic surgery departments are run like small family businesses, Doarns' job experiences include working at large governmental agencies, such as NASA. He understands the layering of administrators and chains of command. These are rather abstract concepts for many physician–administrators, despite self-defenses to the contrary. This strong background in business, management, and government empowers Doarn to analyze and understand many back-office issues more broadly and in greater depth than your typical university MD faculty member. Doarn has an unusual ability to make these topics seem interesting and understandable, while respecting his audiences.
Talking with Doarn one-on-one, you become aware of another of his assets, his impressive memory for facts and concepts. Reading this, he would likely say, “What? Me?” His Midwestern modesty belies memory banks that are steel traps for information and ideas. What he hears sticks with him, and is mentally tagged with where he heard the source. Doarn, seemingly, automatically stores gold nuggets of inflowing information, coming at him from multiple directions. He is blessed with strong intuition as to what matters and is worth remembering. My guess is that his special talent is to gather and repurpose ideas and facts for use as fodder for the steady stream of editorials he and Merrell publish nearly monthly in Telemedicine and e-Health Journal. Merrell and Doarn editorials are worth reading and quoting!
Technology-based journals, such as Telemedicine and e-Health Journal, are burdened by the limitations, and time-limited relevance, of their current subject matter. Even telemedicine is fading as the mainstay of distant healthcare, with e-health likely the next technology to pass through the center of the spotlight.
Additional challenges come from the Editorial Board's mandate to stay focused on Telemedicine and e-Health Journal's primary mission to publish scholarly articles on telemedicine and telehealth. And, the two Editors-in-Chief must be wary of the seductions offered up by next-generation technologies. They must strike a balance between coverage of today's successful technologies and encouraging their likely successors. Of course, these counterbalancing factors are in play while the technology field's ever-parading futurists introduce “amazing” next great telehealth technologies each season, keeping technology coverage a constant challenge.
Merrell and Doarn have more than met these challenges. Let's give Telemedicine and e-Health Journal a thunderous round of applause on its 20th anniversary!
Cheers: well done!