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News and announcements
MMS releases statement supporting Sen. Warren's CARE Act
The physician, resident, and medical student members of the Massachusetts Medical Society thank Sen. Warren for her leadership in recognizing that additional funding and support are needed to help patients who face a chronic struggle with opioid misuse and substance use disorder.
Sen. Warren's CARE Act considers patients, communities, and populations most affected by and most at-risk to be harmed by the opioid epidemic, and, importantly, as it considers the future. The passage of the CARE Act would provide a decade's worth of funding - to increase research into
treatment, expand access to care, and provide training and depth to the corps of health care professionals dedicated to reducing harm and saving lives.
Read the full MMS statement below.
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MMS and Alliance Charitable Foundation award grants to health-focused organizations
The Massachusetts Medical Society and Alliance Charitable Foundation has awarded grants to health-focused organizations across the state. The awards, totaling $281,278 and benefitting 25 organizations in 2019, bring the total amount of grants made by the foundation to nearly $4.2
million.
Five organizations will receive grants totaling $50,000 to address the areas of food insecurity and nutrition education: Just Roots in Greenfield; Lovin' Spoonfuls in Hampden County; Framingham's South Middlesex Opportunity Council; Our Neighbors' Table
in Amesbury; and The Farm and Community Collaborative in Lakeville.
Four organizations providing behavioral health services to those who would otherwise not have access will share $48,000: MetroWest Free Medical Program in Sudbury; Interfaith Social Services in Quincy; The Fatherhood Project at Mass General Hospital; and South
End Community Health Center in Boston.
Six organizations increasing access to health care for the un/under insured received a total of $67,500: Amherst Survival Center's Free Health Program; Saint Anne's Free Medical Program in Shrewsbury; Father Bill's & MainSpring in
Brockton; The Sharewood Project in Malden; Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires; and The Outreach Van Project in Boston.
Click below to read more about these organizations and the other grant recipients.
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Mass. DPH launches "Vapes and Cigarettes" campaign
Forty-one percent of Massachusetts high school students have tried e-cigarettes at least once, and 20% of these students reported using them in the past 30 days. Almost 10% of middle schoolers have tried e-cigarettes. If your patient population includes pre-teens and teens, or their parents,
the Massachusetts Department of Public Health has launched a new campaign called "Vapes and Cigarettes. Different Products. Same Dangers." Visit
www.mass.gov/vaping for information, posters, and handouts. There is additional information for adults at
www.GetOutraged.org.
We need your opinion! Help us design a CME workshop
The MMS Minority Affairs Section would appreciate your input on potential topics for a future CME workshop. Please use the following link to complete a two-minute survey on SurveyMonkey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/55RYBSR. Thank you!
June 6-7: Managing workplace conflict: Improving Leadership & Personal Effectiveness\
This educational forum designed for physicians (in clinical practice, administration and leadership) will explore complex relationships within the medical work environment. Participation in this course will help you develop techniques to address and resolve difficult relationships
and stressful situations, as well as strengthen relationships with other team members and patients.
This two-part program will be held at the MMS headquarters in Waltham.
Click here to learn more and register.
NEJM.org introduces new benefits for free account users
Beginning this month, the New England Journal of Medicine will make the following materials freely available to all signed-in NEJM.org account holders:
- Images in Clinical Medicine
- Quick Take videos
- PowerPoint slides and PDFs of articles that are freely available to all
- Articles coordinated with medical meetings (during the meeting)
Subscribers, including MMS members who have NEJM.org access through their membership, and site license users will have access to this content as well, provided they are signed in.
Benefit Buzz
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Assessment of your current processes will help you to identify inefficiencies and workplace productivity. Consider conducting workflow analysis with each group of staff to really understand what could shift and what should remain in terms of responsibilities. Our consulting team can help you
analyze the practice and work through the process, and develop tools and activities geared toward helping the practice efficiently move toward intended outcomes.
Our goal is to provide you with the support and information you need to maintain a thriving practice. To learn more about workflow analysis and staffing model assessments, contact us today at PPRC (781) 434-7702 or email us at
pprc@mms.org.
Educational programs and events
CME Education Programs & Events
Featuring CME Live Activities
Managing Workplace Conflict – Improving Leadership and Personal Effectiveness
- Thursday, June 6, 2019, 7:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
- Friday, June 7, 2019, 7:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
MMS and RIMS 2019 Annual Accreditation Conference
- Thursday, June 6, 2019, 9:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.
More online CME
Featured Online CME Physician Wellness and Burnout
More online CME
Quote of the week
"This epidemic over the last few years has been framed by many as largely a white epidemic, but we know now that’s not true."
— Dr. Pooja Lagisetty, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, who led a study on access to addiction medicine.
(ABC)
Tweet of the week
@MyHarmReduction
Researcher & Activist at
@DrugPolicyNerds. Writer. Speaker. Lapsed Academic. Intersectional Feminist. Brown. Chatty. She/Her/Dr. My views.
What’s new in health care
Check out the most clicked-on stories from this week's MMS Media Watch.
Sign up for daily Massachusetts media roundups by email. Some publications are fully accessible only to their subscribers.
Push to close legal loophole shielding doctors from the law (Boston 25)
Massachusetts doctors accused of sexually assaulting patients are not facing criminal charges. Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan says it's stopping criminal cases dead in their tracks.
The issue centers around the word consent. Ryan says when doctors abuse patients and pass it off as being medically necessary, their "consent" is obtained through fraud. "Because they believe it was a means of helping them get better," said Ryan.
Last year, Boston 25 News spoke with a young man who said his doctor, a prominent orthopedic surgeon, made him take off all his clothes to examine his knee. He said the doctor had him lie on his back, stand up, and bend over in the nude.
Community health centers operating on slim margins (Worcester Business Journal)
Some Massachusetts community health centers are "essentially one snowstorm away from having challenges making payroll," an expert on the industry's finances said Wednesday. Leaders from
community health centers seeking more financial support from lawmakers converged on the State House, where Capital Link CEO Allison Coleman told them Massachusetts community health centers had enough cash on hand to last a median 34 days, while those at or below the 25th percentile had 18 days of cash or
less. Coleman said her organization, a nonprofit that helps community health centers plan for growth, recommends a minimum of 45 days cash on hand, and the national median is 65 days. She said Massachusetts health centers also lag nationally on operating margins. While the national
median is a 3.3 percent margin, in Massachusetts it is negative 0.9 percent.
UMass researcher: Antibody shows promise against Lyme disease (WBUR)
The state's $1 million investment toward finding a way to prevent ticks from spreading Lyme disease is paying off, a UMass Medical School researcher said Thursday, and an additional investment could move an antibody proven in labs to protect mice against Lyme closer to a human
trial. As Lyme,
a tick-borne bacterial infection that can cause neurological problems if left untreated, has spread in both the number of cases and affected geography, Dr. Mark Klempner from the MassBiologics division of UMass Medical School has been leading a
team to develop "a novel approach" to preventing the disease.
On health performance, Mass. not such a shiny star (Commonwealth Magazine)
Some argue that it is illegitimate to compare a nation as large as the US with comparatively puny competitors. For comparative purposes, the US population in 2017 was 325.7 million, and the 10 non-US comparators' combined population was 322.8 million. For this analysis, I examined the
10 non-US nations as a group and individually with the US and
with Massachusetts – 12 categories in all. The accompanying table provides data and rankings for Massachusetts, the US, and the average of the other 10 nations.
