June 15, 2007

Thanks for a Great Meeting:  Your attendance at our Annual Meeting was outstanding--almost 80 of you left your offices and traveled to hear two stellar speakers (HANYS' own Daniel Sisto and Jim Larranaga, head coach of the George Mason Colonial basketball team) give two very different, but equally compelling talks.  Mr. Sisto painted a superb portrait of the rapidly-changing health care landscape in New York and how HANYS and WNYHA are reacting to that, and Coach Larranaga detailed the philosophy he used to make his basketball team the first mid-major college team in history to reach the Final Four.  The evaluations you turned in indicated to me that the program was a success.  Thank you for your encouragement and for your participation.  We are already planning next year's!

Another Thanks:  Thank you, too, for the words of encouragement regarding our fledgling idea to provide physician recruitment services to our members.  Remarks ranged from, "It couldn't hurt" to "Can you start tomorrow?"  We are doing our due diligence now, and I am planning a trip next month to the Maine Hospital Association, which does the job and does it well for its members.  Our goal is to help you bring physicians to the area, save you money, and make your WNYHA membership even more valuable to you.  With luck, we will have the program launched this year.  Again, thanks for your enthusiasm.

Web Site Revamp:  We've begun looking at the WNYHA Web site and have concluded that it certainly needs an overhaul.  We want to make the Web site as convenient and as useful to you as possible; so, over the course of the next few weeks, we will be sending you a brief questionnaire to get your insights into what you would like to see on the Web site.  One of the link sections we definitely want to include would be links to each member who would like us to provide that service.  With your help, we will identify more content and links that will make the WNYHA Web site robust.  Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Another Annual Meeting:  We hope to see many of you next week at HANYS' Annual Membership Conference.  While I have attended this event several times in the past, those instances were as a member (Southern Tier Health Care System); this will be my first with WNYHA/HANYS, and I am very much looking forward to it.  Paul Sweet is attending also.

See you there!