Medical Degree: University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Science, Des Moines, Iowa (1992)

Candidate Question Response: Three skills or attributes critical to the effectiveness of a member of the ACEP Board of Directors are vision, unique knowledge, and collaborative thinking.

Vision

Jonathan Swift said, “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” I believe that organizations benefit greatly from directors who have individual vision crafted by their unique professional experiences. Sharing of individual vision provides synergy to gain organizational insight and clarity in direction and mission. Vision should be rich in well-informed, relevant experience, with sufficient breadth and depth to provide historical perspectives and generate future insight.

My leadership experience with ACEP began 23 years ago and includes my most recent service as ACEP Council speaker. I have served on nine different national committees (excluding Council committees) for a total of more than 30 years of service (serving on multiple committees simultaneously), and I served as chair on five of those committees for a total of 13 years. In addition, I have served on the NEMPAC (ACEP’s political action committee) Board of Trustees for the past six years and served two terms as president of Ohio Chapter ACEP. My experience includes multiple task force appointments, including the current ACEP Diversity Task Force.

My ACEP leadership experience and duration of service, along with a diverse professional background, help to inform and guide my vision. Board members don’t think or work in isolation. Their perspectives, combined with a variety of other opinion sources, should be a catalyst to unification of thought and direction for the College.

Unique Knowledge

My professional and educational background would complement the current Board well and is timely with the current challenges facing our College, our specialty, and our members. Although I have considerable experience with leadership, academics/education, and emergency department operations, I want to highlight two important unique knowledge areas for the Board of Directors: legal expertise and patient safety. My legal degree, combined with work in patient safety, provides me with unique perspectives. I have focused on risk management for more than 15 years and have published three risk-management books. In addition, I have developed and currently administer the largest clinical risk-management program in the nation. I have been the executive director of two patient safety organizations (PSOs) listed with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Thirteen of the 82 current AHRQ-approved PSOs are participating in the national common formats reporting data project, which includes both of the PSOs I have worked with. This project is designed to aggregate national data to identify opportunities to improve patient safety in the US health care delivery system. Complementing patient safety is ACEP’s work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative (TCPI) $3 million grant, which includes the Avoiding Unnecessary Imaging Initiative. I serve as co-chair of the initiative, as we use clinical and utilization data to inform and educate our members how to reduce imaging without sacrificing quality. These experiences led to my recent CMS appointment to the MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act) Episode-Based Resource Use Measures Clinical Committee.

Collaborative Thinking

I have always believed that individual opinion serves the greater good by informing others of new perspectives and stimulating further thought to reach a better, more well-informed conclusion than any one individual may reach on their own. Many hands make for light work through collaborative thinking and, quite honestly, better work and outcomes. In representing you as ACEP’s representative to ABEM for CME (continuing medical education), LLSA (lifelong learning and self-assessment) and maintenance of certification (MOC) since 2010, ACEP and ABEM have collaborated to provide CME for all LLSA modules, select LLSA articles relevant to current practice, and develop performance-improvement modules to meet the Part 4 MOC requirement.