Report from the CMS Board of Directors - March 10, 2023

Dear Colleague:  

Your CMS Board of Directors met this afternoon to take action on physician wellbeing and advance organizational excellence. We welcomed new board members, Rhonda Parker, DO, representing Districts 3 and 4 in rural southern Colorado, and Caleb Bussard, representing the Medical Student Component, and look forward to their addition of expertise and insight. Here are a few highlights from our meeting.

• The board is pleased to announce that we will launch a new wellbeing program on Doctors' Day on March 30 -- Doc to Doc Wellbeing Consulting. In Partnership with the Colorado Physician Health Program (CPHP), Colorado physicians and medical students can use this pre-clinical service to obtain three free consultations with a psychiatrist. Watch for more information coming soon!

• The board, staff and additional CMS members participated in a CME training on implicit bias, knowing that "bias is as natural as breathing," according to speaker Regina Richards, PhD, MSW, vice chancellor of diversity, equity, inclusion and community engagement at CU Anschutz Medical Campus. With three decades of experience and research, she demonstrated the need to acknowledge bias in the medical profession and take action so we can better serve patients and interact with our peers.

• The board received a legislative update from Chet Seward, CMS chief strategy officer and lobbyists Jerry Johnson and Dan Jablan. Now at the halfway point of the 2023 legislative session, we reviewed progress on bills related to our top priorities -- reducing administrative burdens on physicians, opposing inappropriate scope expansions and supporting patient safety, and guarding against attempts to destabilize the liability environment. Learn more about all of the legislation CMS is following through the CMS Bill Tracker. CMS will soon launch a new campaign, Health Can't Wait Colorado, to build coalition support for reducing prior authorization and eliminating cases where it is clinically inappropriate.

Thank you all for your membership. I invite you to reach out to me at president@cms.org with your thoughts on anything affecting your practice or patients.

Sincerely,

Patrick Pevoto, MD, MBA 

CMS President