Do you ever get to a point and wonder where the time has gone?

As I sit here writing this post, I am having one of those moments. I cannot believe the Iowa Medical Society (IMS) annual meeting was the weekend of April 12 and 13 (over a week and a half ago).  Many great things occurred at this meeting, and I was very fortunate to have been invited to be a speaker and a guest that weekend.

On Friday, I presented to the IMS Healthcare Executive Section on the topic of “Risk-Sharing Contracts,” and on Saturday had the wonderful opportunity to present a session on the “Legal and Ethical Issues Related to Patient Advance Directives” along with Dr. Lauris Kaldjian, who is the Director of the Program in Bioethics and Humanities, and Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, where he also holds the Richard M. Caplan Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities.

The historic change at this meeting took place on Sunday morning when the IMS House of Delegates voted to adopt the recommendations in the Mulhausen Report (named for Paul Mulhausen, M.D., Chair), which recommended the replacement of the House of Delegates with a Policy Forum.  After one hundred and sixty years of governance by the House of Delegates, they voted to change the IMS governance to a Policy Forum, which should increase the involvement of physicians in IMS decision-making across Iowa.  As many already have, I applaud Dr. Paul Mulhausen and his committee, Dr. David Thomas, Dr. Marta Van Beek, and Dr. Clete Younger.  I also applaud the work of Dr. Victoria Sharp, who was the IMS president this year and who led these efforts.

Finally, I also congratulate the IMS Executive Director, Clare Kelly, and her IMS staff who worked tirelessly to move this process forward. This change is a very bold step, and I think will benefit the physicians in Iowa, who are part of the IMS, greatly in the years ahead.