Immediate SAGES Past President, L. Michael Brunt, MD speaks with past president, Rick Greene, MD about current and future initiatives of the society, including safely using surgical energy and preventing bile duct injuries.
SAGES Welcomes New Board of Governors, Officers and President Dr. Brian Dunkin
Advancing Telementoring and Improving Outcomes to be Top Priorities
The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) announced the election of Brian J. Dunkin, M.D., as President on April 18th as part of the SAGES 2015 Annual Meeting. Dr. Dunkin is the Head of Surgical Endoscopy at the Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, and Medical Director of the Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation, and Education (MITIE) – a comprehensive education and research institute. He is also Professor of Clinical Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and the John F., Jr. & Carolyn Bookout Chair in Surgical Innovation & Technology.
“I am humbled by the honor of serving as SAGES President for the upcoming year,” said Dr. Dunkin. “The energy and unique ideas created by our membership are unlike any other organization and I am committed to fostering that vitality into meaningful initiatives that serve our members and their patients well.”
Dr. Dunkin will lead two new SAGES initiatives aimed at improving patient care. The first is focused on organizing the society’s work in the quality and outcomes landscape by holding a SAGES Quality Summit in Washington D.C., May 15-16, 2015. There, multiple stakeholders in the field will come together to share their work. The Quality, Outcomes, and Safety Committee will use this information to map out SAGES’ strategy for contributing uniquely to the quality landscape. The second initiative will focus on advancing the field of telementoring – having the ability to mentor a surgeon in one’s own operating room through the early part of their learning curve. Current audio-visual technology enables this type of interaction over distance in a meaningful way and SAGES has created a Telementoring Task Force to leverage collective knowledge and push this field forward. The Task Force is holding a Project 6 Summit in Los Angeles, August 20-22, 2015, where stakeholders in the field will convene to map out strategies to advance the field.
Dr. Dunkin has been a member of the SAGES Board of Governors since 2006 and Chairs the Flexible Endoscopy Committee. He was the Program Chair for the SAGES 2011 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, and serves on the Fundamentals of Endoscopic Surgery (FES) Program, Open-to-MIS, and Finance and Assets Committees. Dr. Dunkin’s areas of research and publication include simulation in healthcare, measurement of procedural skills, techniques in minimally invasive surgery, endolumenal surgery, biliary endoscopy, Barrett’s esophagus, and esophageal physiology.
Additionally, Daniel J. Scott, M.D., has been elected President-Elect of SAGES. Dr. Scott is the Executive Director at the Southwestern Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He holds the Frank H. Kidd, Jr. MD Distinguished Professorship in Surgery and is Professor and Vice Chair of Education for UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Department of Surgery.
Also joining the SAGES Board this year will be Drs. Robert Lim, Paresh Shah and Patricia Sylla.
Message from the President – Summer 2014
It is a tremendous honor and privilege to serve as your SAGES President for the coming year. It was 22 years ago that I became a SAGES member and attended my first SAGES meeting in Washington, DC. The atmosphere at that meeting was electrifying and I will never forget it – it was still in the rapid growth phase of the laparoscopic revolution and it seemed that every week something new was being done laparoscopically. That meeting was also the debut of the Lap Rappers and the precursor to the Friday night main event that has become a signature feature of every SAGES meeting.
Today as I reflect back, it is amazing to see the evolution of our society to an organization that has impacted education and training, research, and innovation in virtually every aspect of GI and endoscopic surgery. Our annual meeting continues to be the centerpiece of our educational activities and we recently had another successful meeting in Salt Lake City with 2000 attendees who experienced a comprehensive program put on by Jeff Marks and Tonia Young-Fadok. Next April 15-18 we will be in Music City in Nashville and Aurora Pryor and Michael Holzman, the Program Chairs for 2015, are planning a fabulous educational meeting.
SAGES now has more than 6300 members, 33 committees, and more than 400 committee members who devote countless hours of work toward making our society and the surgical world a better place. SAGES as much as anything represents opportunity for its members – the opportunity to get involved, to contribute to the work of our various committees and projects, to participate in the annual meeting, and to make a difference in surgical care for our patients.
I’d like to highlight some important initiatives that have been undertaken by our society over the last several years that continue to build and gather momentum. The SAGES Fundamentals portfolio now consists of FLS, FES (Fundamentals of Endoscopic Surgery) and FUSE (Fundamental Use of Surgical Energy). FLS has been taken by more than 5300 general surgery residents over the last 5 years and under the leadership of Steve Schwaitzberg, is exploring international efforts in Latin America, China and other parts of the world. The Flexible Endoscopy curriculum was developed by the American Board of Surgery, in conjunction with SAGES and other GI societies, an effort led by Brian Dunkin. The curriculum has FES (led by Jeff Marks) as the centerpiece, and has now been mandated for general surgery residents graduating in the 2017-2018 academic year along with FES certification. I encourage you to support FES by reviewing the on line web based didactic program and by taking the FES examination; and if you are in a training institution, to integrate the Flexible Endoscopy Curriculum and FES into your surgical training programs. And FUSE, led by Dan Jones, will become available this summer as the first comprehensive educational program to address the topic of surgical energy and safe use of energy devices in the OR.
Enhanced patient safety and improving surgical outcomes are among my top priorities as president. Although it’s been almost 25 years since laparoscopic cholecystectomy transformed the surgical world, we continue to see major bile duct injuries that occur during this most common of procedures. Moreover, the occurrence of a major bile duct injury can be devastating for the patient who otherwise would have undergone an outpatient procedure with prompt return to their normal activities.
At my direction, SAGES has formed the Safety in Cholecystectomy Task Force led by Rob Fanelli and Horacio Asbun with the mission of encouraging a universal culture of safety for cholecystectomy and reducing biliary injuries. The group has distributed a Delphi survey to our committee members in an effort to develop expert consensus on the factors deemed important for the safe performance of cholecystectomy. The results of this survey will guide the task force and bring focus to the project. A subgroup of the task force will hold a retreat in St. Louis this summer to review the Delphi results and further refine the strategic plan for this program with plans to roll out the first phase of this multimodal initiative within a year.
Finally, it is important to be mindful of our humble origins as a society and of our roots in flexible GI endoscopy. To that end, I have asked Tonia Young-Fadok to produce a documentary film on the beginnings of SAGES that we anticipate will premiere at our annual meeting in April. We also plan to highlight other aspects of SAGES incredible history in the coming year as well.
This is a unique and perhaps historic time in medicine with transformative changes taking place in healthcare. We face not only tremendous economic challenges ahead and constraints regarding the costs of the care we deliver, but will also be increasingly be judged and paid according to the quality of our care and the outcomes we achieve. We also live in an increasing regulatory environment that may negatively impact innovation and the development of new technology. SAGES will continue to lead the way as we navigate these challenges and I encourage each of you to stay engaged and communicate to us your thoughts and ideas or concerns. I am convinced that together we can meet the great challenges in GI surgery and medicine in the 21st century.
L. Michael Brunt, MD
SAGES President
SAGES Welcomes New Board of Governors, Officers and President Dr. Michael Brunt
The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) announced the election of L. Michael Brunt, M.D., as its new president on April 5th as part of the SAGES Annual Meeting. Dr. Brunt is Professor of Surgery, Director of the Minimally Invasive Fellowship Program and Co-Director of the Washington University Institute for Minimally Invasive Surgery. Enhanced patient safety and improving surgical outcomes will be among Dr. Brunt’s top priorities as president. Read the full press release on PRWeb.
Message from the President – Winter 2014
It is now about half-way through my year as President. It has been a busy time, reflecting the energy of SAGES and the commitment of its members to work on behalf of our favourite specialty society. We held a retreat and the mid-year Board meeting in Montreal on October 25-26. The retreat addressed several issues of critical importance to the future of SAGES. Let me use this forum to communicate a summary of our discussions.
Surgical Recovery
SAGES efforts in minimally invasive surgery and flexible endoscopy are to improve and accelerate surgical recovery. Most of the literature supporting the use of MIS and endoscopic procedures emphasizes the benefits to our patients. We are a patient-centered organization, but we have not yet maximized the opportunities to measure and improve the complex metric called ‘recovery’. During the retreat we delved into surgical recovery to discuss how we might measure recovery, how we could influence it, what the opportunities for research and education are in this area, and how SAGES could take a leadership role in this field, especially with respect to patients undergoing GI surgery. We have established a task force to study and improve surgical recovery, led by Dr. Liane Feldman, and have adopted the acronym SMART for this program. The SAGES SMART task force (Surgical Multimodal Accelerated Recovery Trajectory) will address the current knowledge about enhanced recovery programs, areas for research, and develop a course for the upcoming SAGES meeting to teach the principles of accelerated recovery, including how to overcome barriers to change within one’s institution. We also will develop a web resource and a mentorship program for people interested in adopting these strategies in their institutions. Look for an upcoming editorial in Surgical Endoscopy on this topic.
Membership
Membership is the lifeblood of the organization. For SAGES to be successful and influential, we need to meet the needs and create value for our membership. One of the retreat groups reviewed membership trends over the past 5 years in each of our membership categories, looked at conversion from candidate to active membership, and tried to understand why some decided to drop their membership. They were charged with developing strategies to reach out to surgeons in private practice and international surgeons to communicate the value of SAGES membership with the goal of ensuring continued growth of SAGES in the future. Dr. Aurora Pryor will lead this effort.
Patient Safety
Continuing with the theme of putting the patient first, another group discussed how SAGES may work to further improve patient safety. This will be a major theme for our next President, Dr. Michael Brunt. This work group reviewed our current offerings, such as the FUSE program, and considered potential future products. The next programs will be directed by data and will use innovative educational methods to communicate these concepts to our members. It is likely that the next SAGES patient safety program will be in the area of biliary surgery, where there is great opportunity for us to make an impact.
Open to MIS
Open to MIS is an initiative started by my predecessor, Dr. Scott Melvin. The aim of this program is to encourage increased adoption of minimally invasive surgical procedures. During the retreat the working group reviewed data on the prevalence of MIS techniques in the management of gallstones, colorectal disease, bariatrics and hernia. They then discussed strategies to influence change through education, marketing and evidence of cost-effectiveness.
Quality Metrics
One of our challenges in demonstrating evidence of the benefit of what we do as MIS surgeons is developing measures of quality that can be used to provide feedback to the surgeon. Most of our traditional outcome measures, such as morbidity and mortality, length of stay, quality of life measures, and symptom scales, are very insensitive to the changes we need to show, or are impractical to be used repeatedly to chart the outcomes after surgery. A working group discussed the development of measures of outcomes after GI surgery, which are sensitive to the operations we do, patient-centered, and can be used in cost-benefit analyses. A group has been formed under the leadership of Dr. Matt Hutter, bringing together representatives from SAGES, SSAT, ASMBS, ASCRS, IPEG, and the ACS to work on this topic. It will be a challenge, but such measures are the most means to enhance the quality of what we do. SAGES is committed to be at the table and to lead this discussion.
Web Presence
Tied to our efforts to create value for our members, in addition to our outstanding annual meeting, we have taken a fresh look at our communication strategy, including the web resources, mobile (social media) communication strategies and our publications. Despite our treasure trove of content, navigating this content to easily find the resources needed has proven challenging. To address this, we will hire a librarian to catalog and classify all our enduring materials and provide them in the most user-friendly format. This will allow our members to access the material they want at the time and place when it is most useful. Our goal is to ensure that SAGES provides value to our members every day and can be the go-to organization to meet all our members’ needs all through the year.
Annual Meeting
The annual meeting is the highlight of the year for SAGES members and guests. Thanks to the efforts of our annual program chairs, Drs. Tonia Young-Fadok and Jeffrey Marks, and the Chair of the Program Committee, Dr. Daniel Herron, we have put together a program for this year’s meeting that is simply outstanding. Our theme this year is “Putting the Patient First: Promoting Innovation and Safety in the OR and Beyond.” We are delighted to welcome an astronaut physician, Dr. Dave Williams, as the Karl Storz Lecturer, and a fighter pilot, turned medical simulation expert, Dr. Amitai Ziv, as our Gerald Marks Lecturer. We will be joined this year by the Military Surgical Symposium. I invite you to look at the Advance Program and look forward to welcoming you in person in Salt Lake City in April.