When the chips are down, we have to return to basics. And the basics are that we have a specialty that’s thriving, professionals who are feeling like they love their job and their work, and newcomers who continue to be drawn to the profession. With that strong foundation, we’ll be able to weather these, hopefully, relatively short-term storms going forward.
TR: What else would you like to emphasize as ACR president?
Dr. Harvey: I’m also very interested in member engagement. That’s especially important now, when our country—our world—outside rheumatology feels divided and tense. People are looking for a place where they can find others with whom they feel familiar and can have a conversation about things of mutual interest to them, and leave feeling as though they can still do something good in the world.
In this tumultuous time, it’s important for the College and our state rheumatology societies to be those spaces for rheumatologists and other health professionals where we can find comfort, happiness, joy, fulfillment—whatever you want to call it.
TR: How do you do that during your term as president?
Dr. Harvey: We need to continue to grow the opportunities to get together at meetings, such as ACR Convergence, the ACR’s State-of-the Art Clinical Symposium (SOTA) and others. In-person meetings are important, not just for the formal sessions, but for the conversations you have and the relationships you form within your selected peer group and outside your peer group, including people from across the world.
When we leave the meeting and go back to our lives and livelihoods, we want to carry those relationships with us, so we need to find ways to connect with each other between meetings. I would like to see the ACR both optimize a digital platform that allows us to interact more effectively, and tailor and focus our messages to individual members.
With regard to tailoring messages, our members tell us an awful lot about themselves based on the meetings and meeting sessions they attend, and the products of the ACR that they use or access. That information can help the ACR personalize messages, so rather than members finding College messages distracting, they will see an ACR email or notification and say, “Hey, I was just thinking about this, and now there’s a message from the College asking me to engage on that very topic.”
