Abstract
12 June 2014 – 10:45 a.m.
Good morning. I want to start by saying:
Congratulations! Congratulations on our 25th anniversary, and for creating a society of such fun, like-minded people. This is a rare thing we have here. There are few societies like ours in which members truly work in so much the same field. Congratulations for being an organization of people whose dedication, intellectual curiosity, and camaraderie make this Society, other than my family, the group with which I am most proud to be associated. Congratulations on forming and sustaining a society that feels so much to me like home.
I want to officially add my welcome to beautiful La Jolla and to this celebration. Special thanks go to Jerry Bartholomew and the program committee members for all their hard work organizing our 25th annual meeting. We have great speakers, great topics and a great location. This will be an outstanding meeting, Jerry! Thanks to Heather Gornik and Marie Gerhard-Herman for a terrific vascular ultrasound course, to Scott Kinlay and Diane Treat-Jacobson for chairing the Young Investigator’s Session, and to Rob Eberhardt, Steve Dean and Paul Wennberg for creating one of the highlights of the meeting, Vascular Jeopardy. Last year’s was a gem. Two facts about last year’s jeopardy prove it was a great quiz: all I heard were complaints, and Mark Creager won.
This meeting, and in fact everything we do at the Society for Vascular Medicine, could not be done without the help and support of our terrific management team at Sherwood. First and foremost, Lee Ann Clark, our Society’s Executive Director, has supplied endless amounts of support and advice to help steer Society for Vascular Medicine (SVM) through a very interesting last decade. Greg Schultz, VP of Sherwood, has always understood our Society’s needs and had our back. Many thanks to Lyn Maddox and Anne Czeropski for all their hard work arranging this meeting, and everything we do at SVM. Kim Santos and Patricia Sullivan have also been indispensable. I can truly say that the SVM would not be where it is today, or possibly not even be here at all, were it not for the hard work of this team.
I cannot think of a better opportunity and time than our 25th anniversary to stop and appreciate the SVM for what it has been, for what it is, and for what it is becoming. I want to start by thanking and recognizing the past presidents of the Society, most of whom are here today. They are, in order: Jess Young; Jay Coffman; Mark Creager; Will Hiatt; Alan T Hirsch; Jeff Olin; Jonathan Halperin; Michael Jaff; John Cooke; Mike Bacharach; Thom Rooke; and Josh Beckman.
I am very proud to say that most of these leaders have been my friends and collaborators. I only hope that I can bring to the Society a small portion of the contributions each of them has made. It is their collective vision, hard work, and dedication, but mostly love of the Society and the specialty, that has brought us to this point.
I want to particularly acknowledge and thank Mark Creager. Not only for his role in leading and shaping, as well as founding, this organization, but also for his hard work and perseverance in building the journal Vascular Medicine to what it is today. To paraphrase another great leader, Winston Churchill: never in the course of human academics have so many owed so much to just one guy. Mark, thank you for your vision, your academic excellence, and for being such a nice guy as you pursue journalistic excellence. Also, I want to thank Heather Gornik for taking on the challenge of filling Mark’s enormous shoes, and taking on the challenge of ushering Vascular Medicine into its next phase. If she does so with half the grace and skill she devotes to everything else, we are in very good hands.
In a couple minutes I am going to talk about some of the accomplishments and history of the SVM. None of this would be possible without the hard work and dedication of our membership. I am very indebted to our Board of Trustees and all the members who donate their time and passion to the Society. I would also like to recognize committee chairs who have stepped up to take on new and expanded responsibilities and are taking the Society in new directions. The greatly expanded role of the education committee, chaired by Rob McBane and Diane Treat-Jacobson, has redefined our educational mission, expanded dramatically with the production of numerous webinars and other initiatives to leverage the talent of the Society. Subcommittee chairs Aditya Sharma, Ramin Artang, Peter Mason and Laith Al Sayegh have been instrumental. Reena Pande has taken on the role of chair of the communications committee and has immediately discovered how much work this is. It is also crucially important to the Society. Rob Eberhardt is chairing a newly reinvigorated training committee, tasked with growing our efforts to train the next generation of vascular medicine specialists. Esther Kim chairs our website committee with aplomb, and I wanted to particularly recognize Bruce Gray for all his efforts to create and administer the American Board of Vascular Medicine with such professionalism.
So where has the SVM been? Looking back on the 25 years of our history so far, I see essentially three phases. The first phase was the foundation. Many of the people who started the Society are here today. What impresses me about their vision of a society dedicated to the specialty of vascular medicine was the guidance they seemed to take from the sense of pure enjoyment. What brings members of the Society together, from that first meeting to now, is an appreciation for the fun of shared exploration and shared knowledge, and the shared experience of defining a specialty. I hope we never lose that.
The next phase of our history I would describe as adolescent growing pains. Currently my main job is raising boys, so I am very familiar with rebellion and the search for independence that are the hallmarks of adolescence. During the first decade of this century, our membership grew significantly. As we grew, we lost, I think, a sense of that early camaraderie and direction. We stopped having a clear idea of who we are, our purpose, and what we want from our Society. But also during this restless decade, we struck out on our own, and established our independence, if not our identity and purpose. During the first decade, we separated from the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC), and established our own meetings and infrastructure. In the process, we have struggled with how to shape ourselves. Questions arose such as: Should we be running a board review course? Can we offer extra-societal CME programs? What is and should be our relationship with industry colleagues? This came not without some concern, as does every adolescence. But as I learn to take a deep breath, and trust with pride that my sons will find their way, I am likewise very proud of the process through which SVM has gone in the past decade. Again, as with every adolescence, it was good and necessary, if not always coordinated and graceful.
I watched my first son graduate from college this spring, and listened to him answer others’ questions about his thoughts and plans. (This is the only way I ever learn what he really thinks!) When he went off to college, he told me, in more polite terms, that there was basically no way he would go into medicine. Fast forward to this last year, when he tells me, without a touch of irony, that it is his considered opinion that medicine offers a chance for the intellectually curious person who loves science to do good while doing well; to help others, and not just themselves, while pursuing a career. Those of you with kids at or beyond this age know how difficult it is to choose to celebrate their discovery, rather than shout something endearing like, ‘WHAT HAVE I BEEN SAYING??!!’. Instead, I have come to realize that a child is like a good scientific theory: you know you are onto a good scientific theory when it starts to explain things back to you.
Likewise, the SVM is coming into its own. To paraphrase Churchill again: I think the process of creating SVM is not at an end, or even the beginning of the end, but I think we are well and truly at the end of the beginning.
The third phase of the history of the SVM we are just writing now. Thanks to Thom Rooke and Josh Beckman’s leadership, over the past 5 years we have been working to re-define SVM, and to build on our foundations and rebellious adolescence. This has meant conceiving of the Society as much more than a great meeting of like minds, but rather to stretch our imaginations and begin new projects—even taking chances. Learning from examples of novel meeting formats, and finding what is new out there, we are learning what we can create that fits the evolving identity of SVM. This process has borne fruit already, thanks to the hard work of many people. Josh Beckman and Herb Aronow have crafted a collaboration with Abbott to lend our expertise to the creation of education tools for providers and patients. This has gone so well that a second collaboration is in the works. We are likewise negotiating with several other companies to embark on similar joint ventures. And our Society has partnered with the University of Michigan to respond to an industry request for proposals for the creation of shared decision-making tools for anticoagulants.
On your behalf, we have been exploring a collaboration between SVM and the Society for Vascular Surgery to create new national quality improvement programs and databases, as part of their Vascular Quality Initiative® program. (The VQI is a network of regional quality groups that function under an AHRQ-listed Patient Safety Organization using a cloud-based data collection and reporting system.) The SVS is excited about this collaboration too, and the SVS lead for VQI, Jack Cronenwett, announced our participation in the project at the SVS annual meeting. We are also in talks to start collaborating with the Vascular and Endovascular Surgical Society (formerly the PVSS), that will begin with shared annual meeting sessions. And we are sending SVM delegates to participate in a joint session at the annual Canadian Cardiovascular Society meeting. SVM was also a participant in the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM)/Consumer Reports joint effort called Choosing Wisely®. For those who are not familiar with Choosing Wisely, it is a challenge by ABIM/Consumer Reports for medical societies to create lists of ‘Things Providers and Patients Should Question’, providing evidence-based recommendations that should stimulate provider–patient discussions to assist making wise decisions about the most appropriate care. I am proud to say that SVM was a contributing medical society to this effort. We are also discussing a collaboration with Vascular Interventional Advances (VIVA), to expand our participation as a team in Choosing Wisely projects going forward.
Just this week, your SVM Board of Trustees approved an expansive policy put forward by Heather Gornik that will be jointly spear-headed by the SVM Board of Trustees, and the Vascular Medicine Editorial Board. This new policy will strengthen our Society’s ability to participate in and respond to guideline and consensus statement documents with other societies. More importantly, it also outlines a process for SVM to become more proactive, producing guideline and statement documents of our own initiation.
Finally, I would be terribly remiss if I did not recognize the work of Suman Rathbun and Josh Beckman to shepherd the specialty of vascular medicine through the complex process of becoming a board-certified specialty under the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM). Their due diligence in bringing the ABIM to understand the importance and value of the specialty of vascular medicine cannot be understated, and is very much appreciated by us all.
So, in all these ways and others, we are starting the next phase of SVM’s history. We continue to have the dual overarching goals of defining the focus and purpose of our Society, as well as expanding the reach of our Society. This means promoting fellowship training and membership growth, while we partner with new organizations to extend the influence of our Society and specialty. This next phase will be one in which we leverage the talent and expertise within our Society to broaden our mission, strengthen our voice, and turn SVM’s view outward. We have always known what a great and talented society we have. It is high time we shared!
In closing, I come back to my boys, and what I did say to them over the years about choosing a career wisely. What I said was simply this: pick a career that you enjoy, and of which you are proud. Clearly, my participation in SVM has been both for me, and it is my solemn pledge to make it as much so for all our members. Thank you for the chance to serve the Society in this role. I very much appreciate and am terribly humbled by the opportunity and by your trust in me. So thank you for your kind attention and thank you for making SVM what it is; but mostly, thank you for working to make SVM what I know it will be.