Board Meeting Minutes, April 24, 2018

Participants:  Geri Baumblatt, Dave DeBronkart, Peter Elias, Nancy Finn, John Grohol, Matthew Holt, Sarah Krüg, Janice McCallum, Jan Oldenburg, Danny Sands, Linda Stotsky, Joe Ternullo, Sue Woods, Tyson Ortiz

Approve minutes from last full board meeting—Janice McCallum

Minutes from March 27, 2018 approved.

Treasurer’s Report (financial and membership numbers)–John Grohol

Wins and Events —All

The successes we achieved in the past month include:

Sips with the Society in Chicago:  Geri Baumblatt had very successful event, both at the reception and at the SPM table at the Beryl Institute event. The three sponsors of the reception were happy & now are networked together. About 15 people new members joined SPM as a result of the event.

Going forward, we’d like to organize more regular events in Chicago, but we need to recruit some helpers. Geri emphasized that holding the reception in conjunction with the Beryl Institute event—and the table at the Beryl event promoting SPM & the reception–helped significantly to boost attendance and new member sign-ups.

Danny pointed out that members in the San Francisco Bay Area, DC, and Australia have all expressed interest in creating a chapter. Geri’s success in Chicago can help serve as model for kick-starting a community around a cocktail event, which we hope to then build into a chapter.

Matthew Holt suggests we allow for members to join a chapter & recommends that we take care to make it easy to sign up for a chapter in the registration process and to allow chapters to control registrations and email communications for local events.  

Jan Oldenburg has experience building the DC HIMSS chapter and can provide support for building a chapter from the ground up.

Another reminder for the May 7 New England Healthcare Executive Network (NEHEN) meeting where Joe will moderate a panel on the topic “Transforming the Culture of Care” that includes Danny Sands, Dave deBronkart, Naomi Fried and Jan Walker (co-founder, OpenNotes).

Burt Rosen’s company, HealthSparq, holds the What’s the Fix conference on May 17.

Goals for 2018 Sue/All                                                                            

Sue has been organizing thoughts & goals for year. Her 3 objectives:

• Alliances & partnerships: who else can & should we ally with? Many other groups share our goals.
• Better articulate organizational goals: partnering, collaboration, empowerment. With marketing help, Sue wants us to be able to answer: what are we accomplishing, what can be our impact, where should we prioritize?  Sue is speaking with founders and e-patient scholars to extract wisdom and build on existing knowledge.
• Funding. Seek grants.

Discussion followed with Peter cautioning that we need to balance wisdom from founders with the need to respond to current issues to remain relevant. Sue doesn’t think goals have changed much, so it’s really a matter of prioritizing. Neither Dave Dolton nor Danny Sands sees risk in interviewing founders.

Member engagement (Connect, Town Halls)—Peter Elias/Linda Stotsky

Activity on Connect has been good and has picked up relative to our previous Listserv. Every SPM member is on Open Forum (and 3 other communities), but they have to sign on & set password in order to participate. Occasionally, someone has a problem getting on, but not often.

There was some group discussion about what we could do to encourage greater engagement.  

Janice suggested a “buddy program”, where board members and other volunteer members connect directly with new members. Before considering a buddy program, which could present excessive time commitments, it was agreed that we need to roll out our welcome package and test out some other tactics for onboarding new members.

Membership—Tyson Ortiz

The Membership update flowed from Member Engagement discussion. Tyson would like to have a programmatic organization chart that he can share with others. Overall, we need better and more up-to-date information on the SPM website.  

Regarding the volunteer spreadsheet, he’d like to offer a more engaging way that provides more context for members to get their bearings on SPM and its activities and figure out how they want to get involved.

Currently, Tyson needs volunteer help with data analysis and could also use some help with survey analysis. The tricky part is to find volunteers who will follow-through and who will be available for more than 1 project.

SPM2018 Fall Conference—Sarah Krüg, Joe Ternullo

Exploratory calls with 1st round of speakers are underway.

Initial discussions with Olin College regarding leading a co-design session at SPM2018 are in progress with 2nd call planned next week. Will engage Mad Pow & Involution Studios, too.

Joe has drafted a project plan (with help from Sue & Danny) and has circulated it to Sarah & Judy. The plan will be circulated more broadly in a week or so. Some things need to occur soon, e.g., we need someone to put something on the website to promote the conference.

Joe wants us to aim high for our fall conference; we want to nearly double our registrations to 250 and he expects every board member to bring in at least one $1000 sponsor and 10 paid attendees. Sponsors names from last year will be included on the 2017 conference write-up, which is still in progress.  

Organizational alliances—Jan Oldenburg

The committee consists of Sue Woods, Dave Dolton, Geri Baumblatt & Jan. The role of the committee is to support existing alliances and help recruit new alliance partners, not act as a roadblock.

Work continues to survey what alliances we already have and to create a framework of appropriate target organizations. The committee wants to act as a clearinghouse/coordination body for outreach to avoid overlap and too many parallel communications.

Jan & Sue emphasized the need to communicate to the alliance committee if you’re already involved with another organization on behalf of SPM.

Sarah raised the question of how we should position the benefits of allying with SPM; what’s our offer?

Reminders:

7 pm tonight; education session on how to use G Drive, G suite, led by Eran Kabakov. Session will be recorded; will be available to all members. Eran will be sys admin for all things Google.

Next full board meeting May 22, 2018 at 4pm

Respectfully submitted,
Janice McCallum
SPM Board Secretary