I was fortunate enough to have been part of the early years of AHDI (AAMT). I was around when we began the transition from volunteers to professional staff. I was around as we began to centralize operations. I was around when we launched our first big marketing project by developing the General Medicine and General Surgery Modules. When we moved the Certification Exam from a pencil and paper to an electronic test in a testing center. When we combined the Journal and the Newsletter into one publication. When we outsourced our publications. When we hired an on-site meeting coordinator.

Each step of the way we struggled with how to pay for this growth. It wasn’t easy to find the money to hire staff and consultants. But as we began to use staff and brought in marketing and membership consultants, we found that we actually began to grow. We found that there was actually a huge pay-off in having staff who were dedicated to getting the job done. We made a lot of progress.

We freed our volunteer leaders up to meet with members, to focus on guiding the association into the next step of growth and development. We asked them to take on the challenges of thinking about the future, developing a blueprint for our role in the evolving world of electronic healthcare delivery, and creating career ladders that utilize our specific knowledge and skill base.

Now AHDI-West is at the same point. For years our association has asked volunteers to give of their time, their money, their creativity, their talent to grow the association. And they have repeatedly stepped up to do just that. But we all know that volunteers fit their volunteer activities in around their work, their family, and the curves life throws them. As our association evolves and more regional associations and state associations are formed, we are finding that we are all beginning to have webinars. Each state or regional association is required to fund their delegates to the AHDI annual meeting to attend the House of Delegates. For us, that’s 3 delegates we need to get to Austin this year. We are all encouraged to get our legislative liasions to Washington DC for AHDI’s Advocacy Summit…and anyone else we can get there to participate in this important event. We are each also trying to do at least one big meeting and several smaller ones to meet the needs of our constituency. Because we are a Corporation, we pay an accountant to do our taxes; this will cost approximately $1500.

All of these are important events and we need to support them. But the question becomes, how do we pay for all of this? We need to find more ways to create income. At our last board meeting, we had a long and intense discussion about how to do this. There are a lot of ways to increase income but they all require making this effort a priority. We need consistent and dedicated effort. But volunteers have other demands on their time that take precedence. So, the board has begun discussing how to afford to hire someone part-time who can focus on marketing and advertising for us. We are exploring some affiliate programs with Amazon and some other partners that might help us. We are also asking our members to make our website their home page. Advertisers want to see how much traffic our site gets, so we need your help. There are comment sections on a lot of the things on our website. Please, please take the time to fill them out. It moves us up the ladder on Google and Yahoo Searches. We have now linked our website to our Facebook and Twitter pages – we need you to visit them, comment on them, and link us to your friends and family…

We all know the mess healthcare delivery is in in this country. No matter how you feel about the current bills in the Senate and House, we KNOW we can make positive changes that impact patient care in a good way and reduce costs. We know the mistakes that are being made by the use of front-end speech recognition systems and templates. We need you to share those stories on our sites. We need to reach the rest of the country with our perspective so we can continue to be heard and changes can be made that protect the patient – our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, spouses, friends, and everyone else!

Not everyone can commit the time to be on the board for 2 years, or to chair a focus group. But we can all spare a few minutes to visit the website and share some of our stories with the rest of the country. Let’s help our leaders make good decisions!

Thanks to everyone who visits, becomes a fan on Facebook or sends a tweet our way!