Rocky Mountain Academy Winter 2005 Newsletter

Dear Rocky Mountain Academy Members:

Here is an update on RMAOEM activities and issues of interest.

2005 Annual Educational Conference
The 40th Annual Educational Conference held January 21-22, 2005 was considered a resounding success. Thank you to Vice-president Doug Scott, MD for his efforts. Our trial partnership with Pinnacol Assurance in hosting the conference proved quite beneficial, thanks in large part to the hard work of Medical Director Mark Frank, MD. With their partnership we were able to have two keynote speakers, Glenn Pransky, MD who again shared his expertise in disability prevention and Michele Crites Battié, PhD who gave an excellent overview on research into the etiology of low back pain. As always, attendees were provided valuable updates from the CO DOWC and OSHA. The majority of the rest of the conference had an orthopedic focus, highlighted by a discussion of advances in spinal surgery by local experts Michael Janssen, DO and David Wong, MD. Increased attendee and sponsor participation helped make this one of the better attended conferences in recent history. We will partner again for the next conference to be held January 20-21, 2006.  Further details will be posted on our website when finalized.

For those of you who did not attend the conference, we would greatly appreciate your completing the attached survey. This will help us to determine if we can implement changes to help facilitate member attendance at future conferences. Please complete survey at the end of this newsletter and return by email or fax.

2005 Annual Membership Business Meeting
The business meeting was held January 21. In addition to welcoming new officers and board members, we discussed the goals for this year which include website enhancement, updating the bylaws, and facilitating RMAOEM involvement for physicians outside of the Denver metro area.
New Officers and Board members: We welcome William Woo, MD as the 2005 Vice-president, Hugh Macaulay, MD as delegate, and John Schumpert, MD on the board of directors. Thank you to all others who expressed interest.

Website
We want your input on ways to make our website a more useful resource for members. Please visit the website at www.rmaoem.org and submit feedback for any additions or changes. To save mailing expenses, we encourage all members who have not already registered an email address to please do so such that we could forward the newsletter electronically in the future.
Constitution and by-laws: The Officers and Board have revised the antiquated RMAOEM Constitution and Bylaws, last revised in 1991. Change requires two-thirds written vote of the members.

Enhancing regional participation
We want to facilitate participation of non-Denver metro area members not only at conferences but also as active members of the component as well. The board has implemented a small travel stipend to partially defray travel expenses for out of state board members and officers. Please watch for an upcoming member survey. Please feel free to add additional comments or suggestions. Please also feel free to call or email me to discuss this further. We encourage members to submit ACOEM House of Delegate resolution ideas to our  delegates for the spring SOTAC meeting.

Colorado Occupational Medicine Residency Program:
Kathryn Mueller, MD, MPH, Director of the UCHSC occupational and environmental residency program discussed declining training funds, without which the residency program may actually cease to exist in the near future! Because our program does not train other safety and health professionals, it does not qualify for the significant federal funding afforded to residency programs at larger educational institutions. Efforts to request corporate and physician donations (tax-deductible) were discussed.

Emergency Preparedness/ Bioterrorism:
John Hughes, MD is exploring the role of occupational medicine in the Homeland Security Initiative for CMS in El Paso.

Colorado issues
House Bill 05-1018: At the General Membership meeting we discussed the recently proposed bill concerning “the ability of an injured worker under the ‘CO Workers’ Compensation Act’ to select the medical professional who will attend the worker”. The bill can be found at http://www.leg.state.co.us.

Impairment Ratings
We also discussed the fact that Colorado remains the only state in the nation where physicians are legislatively mandated to continue to use the AMA Guides 3rd Edition revised, first printed in 1990, while other physicians, including those from other states in RMAOEM, have progressed to the 5th edition. This will be even more of an issue when the 6th edition is published, possibly this year. Those of you attending last year’s conference will recall the study conducted by Chris Brigham, MD commissioned by the DOWC evaluating the potential impact of the change to a more recent edition. The link to the study is found on the DOWC website under Medical Topics, research at the bottom left of the screen at http://www.coworkforce.com/DWC/. Avenues of change continue to be explored, including through the Colorado Medical Society Workers’ Compensation Committee.

DOWC updates

Updates discussed by Dr. Mueller at the conference were the proposed TBI guideline, opiod recommendations including review of functional status which is available on their website, fee schedule changes, and utilization standard changes. A copy of her presentation will be posted on the website.

New Mexico issues
Conference: March 11-12, 2005 “Regional Issues in Occupational and Environmental Health” in Albuquerque, NM. For more information, see the UNM website at: http://hsc.unm.edu/cme/2005Web/OccupationalMed05/OccupationalMedicine2005Index.shtml

Other state issues
We encourage members from other states to submit relevant news items for future newsletters.

Sincerely,
Annyce Mayer, M.D., M.S.P.H., FACOEM
President RMAOEM
(303) 798-1009
Annycemayer@yahoo.com