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September 17, 2001 Dear Colleague: This letter to you was
drafted just prior to the tragic events last week in New York City, Washington
and Pennsylvania. Some of you have
experienced personal loss of family and/or friends and we all grieve with
you. All of us have experienced an
individual and corporate loss of the liberties we cherish and have taken for
granted. And all of us are in shock and pain.
From this refining moment, so difficult to endure, I believe we will
emerge stronger and better human beings.
We must take this time to reflect upon, question and perhaps redefine many
of our priorities, determine where we can make a difference, and become
involved to make the world a better place.
We need to recommit to listening to and caring for each other. Each of us has a role to play. And we do not know how much time we have to
play it. As many of you know from Dr.
Bray’s extremely kind words in the last ASHI Quarterly, my husband died in
early May. He was, as Dr. Bray
commented, a tremendous source of strength, wisdom, courage and guidance for
me, and I feel much diminished by his absence, even more so at this time. But I do want to tell you all how very much
your emails, cards, letters, flowers, plants and charitable donations meant to
me. It would have been impossibly
difficult to go through these days without your support, encouragement, and
timely, caring words. If I don’t thank
each of you individually, I hope you will know that your thoughtfulness is very
precious to me and that I have thanked you many times in my own heart. Thank you again, now. By contrast with the
foregoing, the events of ASHI take on a different dimension. But it is important to apprise you of all
that has been going on. Many people in ASHI have
been working diligently on the strategic plan.
This is very much in keeping with redefining our corporate
priorities. In a previous issue of the
Quarterly I outlined the major points of the strategic plan. Here I want to lay out for you the key
strategic objectives that were conceived (see attached list) and to update you on some of the
progress. The committees will update
you on their progress toward the other objectives at the annual meeting. Major progress has been made
toward two of these objectives (#1 - analyzing the current structure and #3 - developing
a public policy agenda). During the
strategic planning process, it became clear that the ASHI infrastructure was
inadequate to achieve the objectives we all felt were so important. As a consequence, Council decided that one
necessary step was to terminate our contracts and/or issue new RFPs for
management, government relations, and proficiency testing to be sure that the
contracts we have would be consistent with reaching our goals. This process has been essentially completed
for the management and government relations contracts and is nearing completion
for the proficiency testing. As you
hopefully saw from my earlier email, ASHI’s new management company is
Association Headquarters (AH) in Mt. Laurel, NJ. Of the 10 groups that they manage, we will be in the top third in
size. They also manage AST, and so have
considerable experience in transplant related issues and putting on high
quality scientific/clinical meetings.
While we will benefit from their experience with AST, we have required
that management of the two organizations be clearly demarcated so that
conflicts of interest will not occur.
AH has already begun the transition of our accreditation program and
there is an ASHI member transition team in place to work with them and AMP on
the rest. It is our goal to make this
seamless to you. Already AH has some
exciting plans in place to help our society enhance its image and raise its
profile. I think you can look forward
to some innovative and creative ideas. In another effort to raise
our profile, Council has voted to retain a new government relations firm, MARC
Associates. This group is very well respected in Washington and will assist us
with key regulatory and legislative issues.
You finally can expect to see some help with the coding and reimbursement
issues that have plagued many of us. Further, you should expect to see timely
and frequent updates on policy issues going on in Washington. Topics such as genetic testing, HIPAA
regulations and stem cell research are all matters we can expect to be kept
informed about. We are also hopeful
that we will eventually be able to obtain appointments for ASHI members on some
key advisory/governmental committees.
Council believes we can look forward to substantial progress in these
long overlooked areas. In this regard, one issue
that personally concerns me is the absence of ASHI members on key committees
everywhere. Major changes impacting our
field are occurring all around us. UNOS
is currently considering elimination of HLA match points for kidney transplantation
except for zero mismatch organs and has already decided not to use HLA at all
for pancreas transplants (based on 20 transplants that could be analyzed). It has also eliminated extra points for
phenotypic matches. I think we can
anticipate more erosions like this, and we need to be prepared to evaluate
whether policies made in earlier years with different immunosuppressive
regimens still make sense. We also need
to be insisting on evidence based medicine. In any case, we need to be tuned in and actively participating in
the quickly moving discussions. In
addition, we need to be educating the patients! For the objective of raising
our profile and identifying common interests with other societies (#4), I am
happy to report that we have increased our interactions with our sister
societies this year. While we still
have a lot of work to do, we have or will sponsor sessions with AAI, AMLI, AABB
and FOCIS this year. Next year, with
the hard work of our Scientific Affairs committee, we will do a joint
workshop/meeting with NIH. Look for
upcoming announcements. Finally, let me bring you up
to date on our progress regarding histocompatibility testing for non-renal
transplants. Numerous discussions have
been held by Council, the public policy committee and with our
clinical/surgical colleagues. There is
now a commitment by ASHI, AST, and ASTS to hold an invited joint task force
meeting to review the data and come up with a consensus position (insofar as
possible) regarding what the policy should be.
All of the societies have made equal financial commitments to underwrite
the costs, and a grant proposal has been submitted to HRSA, where this meeting
is viewed favorably. The consensus
position will then be submitted to CLIAC for review and recommendation for
modifying the Code of Federal Regulations, as necessary. This whole process represents an enormous
step forward in partnering with our clinical colleagues for the good of the
patients. It has also laid the
foundation for one of the successes of this year, in which ASHI members were
among a select group of about 100 transplant experts to be invited to a March
meeting in Crystal City, Virginia, to discuss issues related to using expanded
donors. This meeting was highly
interactive, evidence based, and collegial, and it went a long way toward
starting to mend some fences with our clinical colleagues. Reasoned discussions, based on good data, promote
our reintegration into the greater transplant community of professionals. We have come a very long way
this year. But we have a very long way
to go. I hope each of you will find a
place to get involved and bring your energy and enthusiasm into helping to
rejuvenate and redirect our society into something better and more worthwhile
than it has ever been before. And I
trust you will do this, not only for ASHI, but that you will also find a way to
make a difference outside of ASHI in your own circle of influence for the sake
of all those who are no longer with us.
I offer my thoughts and prayers for our collective success. Sincere warm regards, Dolly B. Tyan, Ph.D. President STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES 1. Assess the current organizational structure to see if
it fits the plan we have articulated 2. Identify effective two-way channels of communication 3. Develop a prioritized public policy agenda 4. Identify common interests between other societies and
ASHI 5. Create and implement a process for real-time ongoing
needs assessment 6. Create and implement a marketing program to target
current and potential new members 7. Establish a prioritized research agenda 8. Develop an organized structure to initiate and
conduct clinical studies 9. Create a database of members to include their
demographics, expertise, research and clinical activities 10. Position our members on committees and boards of
other key organizations 11. Develop a process for continuity of
leadership-succession plan 12. Develop a process to collate/compile data and
information 13. Enlarge the scope of our journal to reflect the new
vision of our Society 14. Coordinate information gathering process 15. Develop a strategy to recognize member achievement in
science 16. Create and implement an on-going process to assess
ASHI's role and capabilities within the current and future practice of medicine 17. Prioritize resources for current strategic plan Close this window to return to the previous page |
