I am aware of the challenges and opportunities of academic rheumatology because of my involvement at OSU. Further, I have worked side by side with many academicians in a variety of ways as we contributed to the work of the College and addressed the needs of both sides of our great specialty.
And the Year Ahead
Regarding this next year, since we have recently revisited and enhanced our strategic plan, we are taking essential steps to implement that plan. During our strategic planning process, our mission statement was subtly altered by the addition of a terminal exclamation point: Advancing Rheumatology! That punctuation mark indicates the vigor and enthusiasm with which we strive to achieve what is good and right for our members, whatever their discipline and in whichever setting they work.
The goals for the plan state that, by 2016, the ACR will:
- Develop tools to address evolving payment reforms, increase practice efficiency, and improve quality of care;
- Increase recognition of the value of the specialty of rheumatology;
- Strengthen research and training in rheumatology;
- Provide an information technology infrastructure to deliver ACR initiatives;
- Reshape volunteerism;
- Increase its international outreach and presence; and
- Meet the changing educational needs of our members and stakeholders.
Using reports from the 2020 Task Force and the Blue Ribbon Panel on Academic Rheumatology as well as strategies developed as part of the strategic plan, we have a clear road map to reach these goals.
Beyond these grounding, anchoring directives, forged in calmness and professional cooperation and reflection, we find ourselves beset by great changes for medicine and for our subspecialty that are coming at all of us rapidly. Societal forces far larger than the ACR and far larger than the house of medicine are bearing on us all. These powerful pressures will alter the way we practice and perhaps even change our relationships with our patients. These forces also will change how we are paid for our services. There is no map yet for our navigation through a terrain that has not yet been built. Be assured that we will follow and react to this terrain and, when possible, shape it.
There are many other challenges we face. Our members whose primary focus is in research see mounting threats to the viability of their enterprise from unprecedented cuts in federal support for scientific inquiry created by a Congress that has encumbered research funding by sequester and stagnant or declining National Institutes of Health budgets. These rash decisions have placed in peril the careers of many of our members, especially those who are just beginning to become the investigators who will make the discoveries that will improve the lives of people with “our” diseases.
