The ACR’s COIN Department Connects Providers with Communities

Earlier this year, the ACR was honored as one of five recipients of the 2018 American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Innovation Grants Program award. In essence, by making the monetary award, ASAE recognized COIN for its innovative approach to collaboratively building programs that work to improve health in everyday life.

The overarching strategic direction of the department is guided by a member-led working group. Individual projects are conceived and implemented by members. Members working with COIN may lead in-depth projects, such as designing, evaluating and piloting novel models to increase knowledge about rheumatic conditions among primary care providers in rural communities, or they may engage in activities with short time commitments, such as editing educational content or serving as a featured expert guest on a Simple Tasks Twitter session, known as #RheumChat.

Many members [are] motivated to get involved in community-based activities with the potential to improve the health of people with rheumatic diseases.

Under Construction

Against the backdrop of an organization that is 84 years old, a four-year-old department is in its infancy. This presents a rare opportunity for members to pioneer programs to expand rheumatology’s goodwill footprint around the world.

For members, the ACR ensures that all of the work COIN does—programs toward health equity, creating models to increase rheumatology-related capacity in places of need, building bridges with local and national patient organizations—is done on your behalf. I’d like to thank Sam Lim, MD, MPH, and ACR Sr. Director Sheryl McCalla for their continued leadership on COIN.

I encourage all of us to take part in shaping COIN’s next steps. How would you like to connect to the community around you? What needs do you see that the ACR may be able to address through COIN?

AARP founder Percy Andrus, PhD, is quoted as having said, “The challenge—to live up to our better selves, to believe well of our fellow men and, perhaps, by doing so to help create the good. To experiment, to explore, to change, and to grow.” In each of the next four issues of The Rheumatologist, we will spotlight a COIN activity through which your membership “creates the good.”

Please fill out this short survey to help inform COIN as it shapes the direction of future projects. If you have a specific interest or idea, contact the Collaborative Initiatives department.

David I. Daikh, MD, PhD, is the 81st president of the ACR. Dr. Daikh serves as the director of the Rheumatology Fellowship Training Program at the University of California San Francisco and as chief of the Rheumatology Division at the SFVA Medical Center, where he directs the Rheumatology Clinic.