{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/8k74t6gw3k/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Gordon Schmittling"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine.  Disclaimer:  The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2015-07-29 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Dr. Herbert Young (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["American Academy of Family Physicians"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Gordon Schmittling (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: \u0026nbsp;The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/154133/file/283333","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 2 - Schmittling_Gordon_15_a.wav"]},"duration":3587.65489,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/154133/file/283333/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/154133/file/283333/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/283/333/original/Schmittling_Gordon_15_a.wav?1753284925","type":"Audio","format":"audio/wav","duration":3587.65489,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/154133/file/283333","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/154133/file/283333/transcript/81829","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Gordon Schmittling Interview Transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/154133/file/283333/transcript/81829/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Do we have permission to electronically record this interview?\n\nYes.\n\nI’m Herbert Young and this is Wednesday, July 29, 2015. We’re in the Center for the History of Family Medicine to do an oral history. \n\nWould you state your name to start?\n\nGordon Thomas Schmittling. \n\nWhat is your present title?\n\nWell, I have been promoted yesterday to VP, so it’s now in the title. So it now says CIO/VP. But for the last three to four years I was CIO. \n\nAnd that stands for?\n\nChief Information Officer.\n\nAnd was a new position, we didn’t have one before.\n\nYes, the Academy never had a Chief Information Officer until about 2011, ’12 and Accenture did a report about IT and one of the 23 recommendations was hire a CIO.\n\nWe’ll come back to more about the Academy but let’s get a little background just on you as a person. Where were you born?\n\nI was born in St. Louis, Missouri. \n\nAnd when was that?\n\nMarch 3, 1949. My mother and father lived in Belleville, Illinois and they came across the [Mississippi] river. A GP delivered me at Josephine Heitkamp Hospital. And then after I was born, we went back across the river to Belleville, Illinois.\n\nAnd your parents’ names?\n\nIrma Eva Schmittling and Henry John Schmittling.\n\nWhat did they do for a living?\n\nMy dad was an attorney and he worked for American General. At the time it was Maryland Casualty, then it became a different name and eventually ended up as AIG and he was the office attorney for St. Louis. He had about 20 lawyers working for him. And my mother was a housewife. \n\nAre you married?\n\nYes.\n\nWhat is your spouse’s name?      \n\nGeorgia Lavina Schmittling.\n\nHow did you meet her?\n\nAfter I finished graduate school, the first job I had was with the American Nurses Association in Kansas City, Missouri. I got that job in probably 1975, somewhere in there. I started in March. Georgia was hired as a secretary in another division in August of 1975, probably in July of 1975. Two or three months later I asked her if she wanted to get engaged and said yes. And as always, she takes things to extremes and thought that meant get married and we got married in ’77.\n\nAny children?\n\nWe have three children – Melanie Lavina Schmittling and then Lance Henry Schmittling and Amanda Elizabeth Schmittling.\n\nAnd were they born here?\n\nThey were all born at Research [Hospital].\n\nBack to your early days. Where did you grow up?\n\nI grew up in Belleville, Illinois for one year, then I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and I went to high school in St. Louis. It was called, at the time, St. Louis Preparatory Seminar South. And I graduated there in ’67, then I went a year to Santa Barbara to a seminary run by the Vincentian Order of Priests. Then after one year there they transfer you to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. So I was there half a year then I stepped out of the seminary and went to St. Louis University. And, actually, it was in the middle of the Vietnam War and so the draft board, my sophomore year in high school (?), told me that you have the semester, to the fall of the next year, to get enough credits because you don’t have enough credits to be classified as a sophomore in college, so we’ll draft you. And that’s because the seminary, in the first year, it was --. So it was, like, Gregorian Chant, a little bit of French, but not enough credits to really qualify to be a sopho-more. So I took 26 hours a semester, I went to summer school and everything else. And by junior year I had taken enough credits to be called a junior. I really liked college so I took every math course St. Louis U. had. Some semesters I took 26 hours, went to summer school, I had a grand time learning math. So mid-year of my senior year in college I had to drop a course; otherwise, they would have graduated me mid-year. So I graduated with 144 credits in the last semester. And I was always a .005 off in all my grade points. So in high school I would have been vale-dictorian but they computed on the mid-year grades and I was .005 less than the other guy, so he got valedictorian and I got salutatorian. But then when they gave you the diplomas at the end of high school, my grade point was higher than his but he eventually became the Monsieur, the Vice Chancellor of the St. Louis Archdiocese. And Bishop Malmon (?) over in Kansas City, Kansas was a high school classmate of mine. So then in college I graduated magna cum laude with a 3.795 – and, of course, magna cum laude is 3.8. And at the end of the last semester I had a 3.801 but it’s based upon your mid-year semester; so, therefore, I was magna cum laude. I was always .005 off, so…\n\nDid you forgive the institutions for that?\n\nI forgave the institutions. Then I left St. Louis U. I really liked math, so I applied to five different schools, but I wanted to teach. All of them offered reimbursements so I wouldn’t have to pay for college, but Iowa State was the best because they would let me teach math. So I got to teach calculus and things like that to undergraduates. After two and a half years I got a master’s in math. Then towards that last semester or trimester, what am I going to do with a master’s in math because I decided I don’t want to teach. Besides that, you need an education degree, not a master’s degree in math. So I learned that Iowa State had the number one Statistics department in the United States. That’s where statistics was born. Seneticut (?) wrote a book we still use today. It’s really thick and it’s all based upon beets, pigs, corn and everything else that came out of Iowa State, and it was in the ‘40s. So I got a master’s in statistics from Iowa State. And from Iowa State, the other colleges, North Carolina was the next big statistics school in the ‘50s. And IBM then started really big with statistics in the ‘50s. But Iowa State was the cornerstone of it. Of course, the first computer was developed at Iowa State. That went to the Supreme Court and finally agreed upon that Iowa State was the first to develop that. Then you had the Ames Lab which is still there, which was big during WWII for the nuclear program, the Manhattan Project. So then at Iowa State I interviewed with several different people: Coca-Cola and there’s a drug company that I interviewed with in Chicago, Cyril I think it was. And I interviewed with another company, then I took the job with the American Nurses Association of Kansas City. And I’ll never forget, in Iowa you never have a murder. Des Moines Register was a great paper, I would read it all the time. And if somebody got murdered in Iowa, it made every newspaper in the state. So I come to Kansas City and first moved in on a Friday. And by Sunday night I’m ready to go to work the next day and they talked about five murders over the weekend and I kept thinking, what have I got myself into, this city is really in trouble. \n\nSo I worked at the American Nurses Association three and a half years. And at that time the American Nurses Association was like a Sprint today, like a revolving door. And so someone who had worked at American Nurses Association started to work at the American Academy of Family Physicians. I was at ANA for about two and a half years and suddenly I got a call from this woman and she said, “Oh, the American Academy of Family Physicians is looking for someone to do research, maybe you’d be interested in the job.” I said, “Oh, yeah, that would be fun.” So I got a call from Mr. Chuck Nyberg and he said, “Do you want to come for an inter-view?” I did and I remember sitting down for the interview and he said, “Well, what do you do?” I told him, I explained to him I do surveys, I do a lot of research and things like that. And I remember he said…I didn’t even give him a resume. He just asked me what I do and he ex-plained a little bit, “We would like to have a Committee on Research and we need to have some-body to help run it, so would you be interested?” I said, “Yeah.” And he says, “Well, you make too much money.” And I said, “That’s alright, you could probably hire somebody from Iowa State and get a bachelor’s degree and they could probably do what you’ve described.” So the next day he called me and said, “I would like you to come in and meet Roger Tusken.” So the next I came into work, to his office, and then Roger Tusken sat down. And before we started talking, Roger called on the phone and said, “Claudene Clinton, would you come down.” So Claudene comes down and sits in the office with him. And he looks at Claudene and he says, “Claudene, I’d like you to meet Gordon Schmittling, we’re going to hire him. He’s going to be Assistant Division Director the new Division of Research. You’re going to be the Division Director. And then when you retire in five years at age 65, he’ll be the Division Director.” And I just sat there and it just went by so fast. No resume, no nothing, you’re hired. Claudene didn’t even know what the Division of Research was except the Academy at the time had decided to start a Committee on Research and she was going to be the secretary and I was supposed to support her. So that’s really how I got into the Academy.\n\nWell, you’ve raised a whole bunch of interesting questions. One is can you clarify the role of a secretary for a committee because that’s a term that’s had different meanings for different people.\n\nEventually they changed that to a…a secretary to the committee originally meant that you ran the affairs and the business of the committee, took care of the minutes, the agenda and everything else. Well, every one of those people had an actual secretary who actually did all the typing, so eventually they changed that name to executive secretary. \n\nStaff executive. \n\nStaff executive. They changed it to a staff executive. So Claudene eventually was the staff executive to the Committee on Research and I was the assistant and then we had a recording secretary (I forget her name), it was Julia somebody.\n\nLet’s talk a little bit about Claudene Clinton because that’s who you would report to initially.\n\nRight, so I reported to Claudene. So then I had to give notice of where I was working, at the ANA. And I was on a big federal grant. I used to manage big federal grants. So I managed the National Licensed Practitioner Nurse Study, I managed the Registered Nurse Study and these were huge million-dollar grants from the federal government. And I had to sort of transition that to the next person, so I don’t think I started for a month. Then I started to work and Georgia was pregnant at the time with our first, so I remember trying to make sure the insurance would cover it and everything else. So I started in September, Melanie was born in December. Georgia is seven years younger than me, so she was only, I guess, nineteen or twenty at the time. And her biggest thing she always remembers, she tells everybody, “So here I am, 21 years old, I’m big as a blimp and he says we’ve got to go to a cocktail party.” So we went to a cocktail party at Dr. Stern’s house right before Christmas and here’s Georgia, pregnant, and it must have been November because Melanie was born December 19, she’s embarrassed and everything else. So that’s her first recollection of meeting people.\n\nAnd Dr. Stern’s role at that time?\n\nHe was, I don’t know of his title, but it was, like, a Vice President. There were several. Chuck Nyberg was getting ready to retire at the time and…\n\nSo as somebody who in math is very detail-oriented as well as systems-oriented, big picture as well as making sure the fine details work, what did it feel like in terms of how the Academy approached hiring somebody to head the research activities?\n\nWell, there wasn’t a lot of definition about research activities. When I came on board, a lot of staff then came and started telling me all the things that I should do. And I’ll never forget, I was hired in September and when I’m hired in September the annual meeting is coming. So they put me in my office and said, here, read this. And that was two weeks before the annual meeting. So for two weeks no one really met with me because they were all getting ready for…then they all go to the annual meeting for a week and so there’s another week shot. Then, finally, they all come back for a week but they all take vacation. So in the first month I really didn’t have a lot to do. I just sat and read a lot of stuff they did. Back at that time, I actually found a survey that the Academy had done with general practitioners. And in one postcard mailing they got a 60% response. That’s the only survey I ever found that the Academy did and that was with a mailing. I never found any evidence of any…now, they might have put a postcard in a journal and asked people to mail them in, but that’s judgmental sample, it’s not really worth something. But prior to my arrival, they had actually sent out a postcard to all members. So they did not know much about their members’ practices at all. So that was one big thing. So I remember, in my first year it was, like, getting some kind of minimum dataset on all the members. You’ve got to collect some kind of information or how do you know what they’re interested in? So the original impe-tus for the Committee on Research was let’s collect data, questionnaires, things like that. So in that first year I organized a survey of 4400 members. First we did a census survey and we sent that out. And that was a minimum dataset and a lot of people approved of the questions. There were ten questions, like, are you in solo practice, two person partnership, FP group, multi-specialty group, other? And then I had people who would code it and key it. Back in those days there were no tapes, there were no keypunch. This was all keypunched cards, Hollerith cards. That got a good response. We did a second mailing on it. I would estimate that the response total at 75%. Of course, you didn’t have a database or anything to store it in, but at least you got tallies and numbers.\n\nAnd can you just explain for people who may not know the difference between a census and a sample?\n\nA census is where you try and reach everyone. So there’s really no bias in it, usually, because you tried to reach everyone. And if you get 75%, that was an extremely good number for a census. In fact, our current census today has only reached 48% and that’s after four or five years of continual pestering and it’s only reached 48%. We did it in two mailings. Because members back then were not used to the fact of being surveyed that often, so it was very friendly. Now, in that first year I also did a couple sample surveys which you went to the Census Survey, then you would pick all those people that are self-employed or solo practice, then you would survey only those that were in solo practice, then you would have a question for them to answer. So in that first year, after meeting with several people, the commissions all wanted answers, numbers, something to help and guide them because they had no idea what the members were doing. They needed guidance. So after listening to them, it was, like, eight pages worth of questions that everybody wanted. So I segmented them into two groups and I sent out one survey to physicians and it was based upon their office practice. Then I sent another survey to 4400 and that was based upon their hospital practice. And from those two, in that first year, I published five articles: “Hospital Practice of Family Physicians,” “Office-Based Practice of Family Physicians,” what kind of liability insurance do they have, things like that. So those were fun. Then after a year…I couldn’t possibly do all this work. Remember, all this stuff was on Hollerith cards. And I actually used to walk across the street to a service the Academy had through a company called Fraternal Services or Beta Sigma Phi and they’re the ones who had a computer. Well, they had a keypunch group and I’d have them key it. Then, since the Academy didn’t have its own computer, I would drive down to UMKC and I had an arrangement with them to offer us free computer services using their copies of SPSS or SAS which are statistical languages. So I would give them the cards, they would run the cards through the reader. The data would be in one section of the Hollerith cards, the program would be in the other section. They’d run it through their computer, then I would probably come back in the morning, then they’d give me the print-out. And if I misplaced the comma in 4,000 cards, then I’d have to fix the comma, then run it again. \n\nDid that happen often? \n\nNot that often.  \n\nI didn’t think so. \n\nBut then after that you could look at it. Then that would give me the results and from the results of that (there was no Excel in those days), you would take that information and give it to a secre-tary who would type it into tables and you’d show her how to do the tables and things like that. There was no staff, so Claudene had four people in her division and things like that. So that was difficult, those people, to actually do it. I’ll never forget one time, there was a clerk in there, she could code 1,000 questionnaires a day. And another clerk, working full-time, could only do 90 a day. And 90 in eight hours means that you’re spending about an hour looking at and reviewing eight-questionnaire surveys which might only be a page and a half and all you’re doing is mak-ing sure the stuff is in there. You’re not even keying it. So I think it was a different time.\n\nThis was the first time, if I’m hearing correctly, that the Academy essentially said, we need information about our members and we need someone to lead this effort, a committee that obviously had been the Research Committee. And it would be nice if you shared a moment, what sort of people were on that committee? But do you see this as a very significant step in the \n\norganization’s evolution?\n\nYes, because up to that time they did not know who their membership was. They just had no idea. And this was an effort to actually go out and figure out how you can start programming products and services that would meet the members’ needs because now you actually had some data that you could use to make informed decisions. And, of course, those various other com-missions and committees were looking to that data to try and figure out how they could come up with new ways of serving the members, and without any data it was always very difficult.\n\nSo there could be the strong opinion, the strong voice within a committee, but that has weak-nesses, obviously. This was a way of understanding better who the heck the members were of the organization and responding to their needs. Did it in any way help anticipate the future?\n\nOne thing for sure, most members were in solo practice. Most members were entrepreneurs and they were businessmen and they didn’t mind working 55, 75 hours a week because it’s their business. And over time, now I’m projecting 20 years, you could see that was changing. As younger physicians came along, they did not want to work those long hours and they didn’t mind being employed by somebody else. So that was a drastic change over time. After one year I \n\neventually hired Chris Robinson. He used to work at ANA, American Nurses Association. So he came on board, then he was the one who traveled back and forth to UMKC with all the data and everything else. Then I would just say, well, here, run it this way, then run it that way. We still didn’t have anything, no terminal or anything. The only thing the Academy had when I started was Fraternal Services, which was across the parking lot of 1740 West 92nd Street, and there was an underground cable underneath going over there. And if it ever rained too hard, that cable got water in it…and the Academy didn’t have any computers. We only had about 20 dumb terminals in the building at 1740 West. 92nd Street. The only thing that was computerized then was mem-bership. Now, they actually did a membership directory and they used…every member had a little plate and the plate was updated. And then when it was time to do the membership directory, they used these plates to do this work. The Academy evidently, before I even got there, had tried to have its own computer. Jack  Specht, I think, Pete Mitchell, had tried to run the computer. And it just became overwhelming to try and keep up with the payments and everything else, as I understand it. So they eventually said why don’t we go to the service bureau, which was Frater-nal Services. So when I came on board I started looking at a lot about not only the surveys. I already mentioned that first year I did five articles that got published. Usually I was always second author; I let another physician on staff be the author, but I’d write it and organize it. Over time I think I have over about 40 published articles. I started one study that had never been done before which was the medical school study. For all those students who chose family medicine residency, what medical school did they come from? What percentage of those graduates came from each program? That had never been done before. And it was published, I think, in the Society’s [STFM] journal. Originally it went in [Journal of] Family Practice, then eventually moved it to Society because they wanted it because of the educational part of it. And so every year we would have to contribute. And over the years many different people appeared. The first year I wrote the article and everything else. It was a medical school study.\n\nSo back in those early days, again, looking at the future and what our members, what we needed to collect from our members, I noted that in membership, whenever somebody was a student member, when they graduated in their fourth year, they wiped them off the file. And then if they came back and became a resident member, they would add them as a new member. And then when they finished their residency program, they wiped them off the file. Then they reloaded them as an active member with yet another ID. So there was no transition there whatsoever. So in about 1982 I wrote a memo and said, I’d like to have $25,000. I’d like to hire somebody. And I think it’s time that we go back to 1969 and we find every single residency graduate who graduated from a residency program and then we find out if they’re already in our database. And if they are, great, and if they’re not, we add them. I might have gone to the floor to ask for the money, but they agreed to hire somebody. Her name was Kathy Drumwright. She worked two years establishing a great rapport with about 400 residency programs because the goal was to ask every one of them, who are your graduates? And then that data was given to her, then she worked with the Membership Division to get all of them reloaded. Then, also, worked with Fraternal Services on new software that they had to write to make sure that they stopped this business of dropping students and residents, wiping them off the file. It’s a transition – they get loaded as a student, if they choose to become a resident member, great, you just change their member type. If they choose to just stop being a student, you just drop them. Then the same with going to resident, to active, active to inactive, you stop this business of wiping them out, we want to see this transition. So they did that. Plus, they started adding a residency program code the year they completed the residency and a whole bunch of other information, so we had a better picture of that. Now, at the same time, AFP, which is sent to all of our members plus everyone in controlled circulation at the time, I think it was FP, GP, IM, DO, not hospital-based. And you bought those labels from a company called Clark O’Neil which is a franchise mailing house of the AMA. Well, the problem is they didn’t do a good matching of it. And, so, therefore, there was 8,000 to 10,000 duplicate journals sent every month. So members would complain, “Why are you sending me two journals? You’re wasting money.” So I worked with Clark O’Neil and the AMA and got the AMA to give us permission to take the ME number and record it in our database. Then I worked out a system, because based upon the med school I could replicate the first seven digits of the AMA ME number, which I think is eleven digits. I sent that to Clark O’Neil with seven digits. They could look it up using those first seven digits and name and stuff. They would write on paper the last four digits. Then the eleven digits would then be put in our file. Then later on, when we matched with their files, we had the eleven-digit ME number to match with their file, they wouldn’t produce a second file, we reduced our duplicates down to zero.\n\nAnd ME is medical education? \n\nMedical Education number. \n\nSo that saved a fair chunk of money, it sounds like. \n\nAt the time, it was, like, $16,000 a month. This was with Norman Allen who was the Comptroller for AFP. So they had two comptrollers at the time: Art Corbin for the AAFP side and Norman Allen for the AFP side. And when both of them retired, they combined that into one job. \n\nThere was another thing that I worked on, too, because…oh, gosh, in the Reporter, once a year they would publish the names of everyone who passed the ABFM exam and it was abysmal be-cause all these members would start calling, “My name is not in there. What do you mean you put my name in there? I didn’t even take the exam.” It was awful. So then I started a process with ABFM which said, okay, we, the Academy, need to know what the ABFM diplomate number is for all of our members because we want that in our database because we’re telling people who is a diplomate and if we get it wrong, it really makes them mad if we don’t recognize then who they are. So I started a process with ABFM and over time we would look up…we did all the lookup and we still do all the lookup of all the new residents in their database. We get their ABFM number, we find them in our database or add them, if they’re not in our database, and we put an AAFP ID number on it, so now the IDs are matched. And suddenly we don’t have a prob-lem anymore of matching the ABFM number. That’s carried to even more extremes today where the ABFM, when anybody finishes a SAMs or anything else where they get CME credit, it automatically comes into our system and appears in their transcript. And vice versa, we share information with them based upon the resident census.\n\nSo a lot of your work, and by now I’m not quite sure how many years into the Academy, involves working with other members of the family of family medicine such as the [American] Board, such as STFM, in terms of the publication and dealing with residencies. But, also, with the AMA and, of course, their future master file process. \n\nRight. \n\nHow receptive were organizations to your wanting to work with that?\n\nI thought they were always very receptive. In fact, with ABFM, Dick Rovanelli was down there and he thought this was a great idea because there were things they wanted from the Academy. And so we had a big data sharing agreement. That would have probably been in about 2002, somewhere in there. And we had a huge sharing thing that we still have today. \n\nAnd by this point you’re the Division Director?\n\nRight. So in about 199--…Well, Claudene turned 65 and said, look…first of all, there are some interesting stories there. I go on these clusters and I would serve as the assistant to Claudene. \n\nAnd a cluster being meetings of various committees and commissions at the same time? \n\nRight. So Claudene would go to the meetings, then Juliana would be the recording secretary and I would be along as well. And I’d take notes and Juliana would take notes and everything else. Well, when we would come back Claudene would write up all the minutes. Well, it would take her a long time. It would take her maybe 40, 45 days. And we used to have meetings in that old Board Room at 1740 West 92nd Street when Bob was here. And Bob started the Turtle Award and the Turtle Award was given to the last recording secretary to turn in their minutes. And we went in that room one time and Claudene had won the Turtle Award twice. And after the second time we were in this meeting and it came up, I think it was the third time, and Bob announced to  everybody and said, “You know what, I’m going to give this award out for the last time to Claudene. This is the third time she won it. We’re going to retire the Turtle Award or Claudene, I’m not sure which.” And he was joking – and Claudene got up and she went to her office and she just started crying. And I remember walking in and I said, “Why don’t we change the way to do this? From now on I will do the minutes and you edit them.” Because Claudene, bless her heart, was a great editor but she wasn’t a great writer. And so we agreed that’s what we would do from then on. And Bob came up later and apologized to her and I think everything was alright. So, then, guess what? We come back from a meeting with Gordon, we spent the first morning dictating all the minutes. Juliana would have them typed up by noon the next day. Claudene would edit them that afternoon. Our minutes were then out in two days. Nobody ever beat us ever again in getting their minutes out; we were that good. So when Claudene turned 65, she said, I think I’m going to work another two years, so that was age 67, and I had thought, oh, I’ll be division director. Because, really, back at that time they didn’t do interviews or anything like that. So age 67 comes, Claudene says, I think I’m going to work ‘til age 68. Okay, 68. Well, then Bob and Mike Miller, Claudene reported to Mike Miller, they worked out something and they said to Claudene, Claudene we’re opening this new archives and we want you to take care of the archive, buying things, research and everything else. You’re not going to be the division director anymore. And I think they said we’ll pay you half your salary. So Claudene really loved family medicine and it was her life. And so she said okay. So the budget for the archives we put in the, it was called the Research and Information Services budget at the time. So Claudene did her own thing. I’ll never forget a conversation I had with Mike Miller, who then was my boss. Mike says, “What is all this stuff, she’s buying cabinets and everything else, I don’t understand any of this.” And I said, “Well, don’t look at me, she reports to you. All I’ve got is the money.” “So you can’t explain that to me?” “I don’t know, you’ll have to talk to Claudene.” Now, the other thing that happened is right at the time when Claudene did leave, at that time Mike was the interim CEO. And I had bought two PCs when Roger Tusken was here. They only cost probably $5,000 each. And Mike became CEO and Mike said, “Gordon, I don’t want you buying anymore PCs.” So for one year we bought no PCs. The Academy existed on two PCs and the Service Bureau across the street. \n\nAnd this was roughly what era? \n\nThat would have been, I think, 1986, ’87, somewhere in there. \n\nSo the Academy, at that point, had no widespread word processing or other things that…things were being done on typewriters and mimeograph machines and all along that way?\n\nCorrect. So they announced a new policy right before Claudene transitioned and said from now on all jobs will be posted and people will apply. And so about a month and a half later Claudene transitioned to take care of the archives and Mike called me in and said, “Gordon, you’re going to be the new division director of RIS and Karen is going to be the assistant division director.” And I said, “Mike, a month and a half ago you issued a policy that said people have to apply for jobs, shouldn’t I apply for the job?” And I’ll never forget what Mike Miller said, “Are you telling me what to do?” I said, “No, sir.” And that was it, I was the division director and Karen was the assistant division director. \n\nSo about that time…you asked about word processors. Joe Godek used to take care of Fraternal Services. Joe Godek used to take care of word processing stuff. Joe Godek was the administra-tive division head after Pete Mitchell, but that’s another story. Let’s go back to Pete Mitchell. Pete Mitchell took care of the membership directory, the one that went out every year. So they sent out the membership directory and all these members called in with mistakes. Lots of mis-takes. And Pete Mitchell reported it to Terry Schulte and Terry Schulte comes to me and says, “Gordon, do you know what might have happened?” And I said, “Terry, I bet you still haven’t sat anybody down to look at just one page in that membership directory to see how many mis-takes there are.” So he did and he comes back and there’s lots of mistakes just on one page. So then they said, “Gordon, nobody else has computer experience.” And Pete was about to retire at the time. So they decided, “Pete, why don’t you just go and we’re not going to have a party for you because everybody’s mad, we’re going to have to reprint the whole membership directory.” So I started looking into the membership directory and I found out that they took a tape and didn’t tell the vendor but they packed the fields. And it’s something that’s in COBOL where you pack numbers. So every number that ended in a six and a nine, or something like that, that six and a nine was changed to a zero. So, therefore, I estimated something like 35% to 40% of all entries in the membership directory were wrong. And so I had one month to redo it. And I re-member at the time they said, “Gordon, why don’t you report to Bill Myers.” I said, “No, I’m not reporting to Bill Myers, I’m reporting to Claudene. I’m not changing my…”\n\nAnd Bill Myers at point was? \n\nThe VP of Membership and Administration Division. So they let me be where I was, and I think they were desperate to get out a correct membership. So I figured out all the things that were wrong and it was just gobs of stupid stuff. If you spelled your city Saint Louis, S-a-i-n-t, it would appear under St. Louis. But if you spelled it S-t Louis, you appeared under S-t Louis. If you spelled it as S-t-. Louis, then you appeared under that. It was just…so I wrote a program and I went through and I changed all the city names to make them consistent, all the state names. Found out all the anomalies of things that didn’t exist right. I found people who graduated from medical school prior to their birth year. And I had membership also because they were proofing all of this. Now, there’s other pages of that, and I’ll never forget this…there were other pages in there, like the officers were complaining their names weren’t spelled right. There were so many mistakes. So the printed pages from the computer that printed the names, I took those to indi-viduals and I asked them to proof something on the page. Or I would take the list of officers’ names that had been typeset, I would take them to somebody and say, “Would you proof this page, you’re in charge of the officers?” And they would hand it back to me almost immediately and say, “Oh, it’s okay.” I’d say, “Okay, all you have to do is initial the bottom and put the date on it.” “Why do I have to do that?” “Oh, when somebody complains about a mistake they’re not going to call me, they’re going to call you because you proofed that page.” And nine times out of ten they’d say, “Give that back to me,” and then they’d start proofing it. So the Membership Directory went out and nobody called anymore with mistakes. Then, you might say, more and more I kept making changes to the database and everything else, so finally they decided maybe Fraternal Services, Gordon is the one who is dealing with them all the time, we’ll just transfer to computers from Fraternal Services into RIS and then they won’t take care of it anymore. Now, during that time they had bought a lot of stand-alone word processors. I think it was called CPT. And essentially all they did was word processors. And I kept saying to Terry, why buy that stuff, that’s all it could do, you should be buying PCs. So I eventually convinced Bob Graham of that and we got rid of, I sold ten of those things. You had to stand in line and get in the queue to actually use them to type your minutes and stuff. \n\nWas this in the era of WordStar? \n\nWordStar would have been on a PC. This was a stand-alone word processor and that’s all it did, was word processing. So I remember I sold all ten of them to the Kansas City, Kansas School District that was heavily involved in it and I got $9,000 for it for the Academy. Then I went out and started buying, with Bob Graham’s permission, PCs which then, that was after Mike said the moratorium was over because now they hired Bob Graham. Then I started buying all these PCs and people started using…what we started with first was MultiMate. It was a very easy language to introduce. Then we moved from MultiMate to WordPerfect. Then, of course, later transitioned to Word. \n\nSo this was over a period of time that the Academy’s sophistication, integration of various electronic systems occurred. Were we at the same pace as other organizations? Were we behind? Were we ahead?\n\nThat is hard to predict because there was no Internet, there was no email, there was no way of communicating with people. And because there was no Internet in the RIS Division, we had people who were in charge of information services because members would call in and say could you tell me about such-and-such and they’d go research it in their library and then give them an answer, because there was no Internet. \n\nI think somewhere in about ’90 I convinced the Academy to dump Fraternal Services. And I did it buy buying an IBM 4361 used. It sold brand new for $450,000, I bought it for $19,000 used and I got twenty terminals. And I remember that Fraternal Services was told we don’t need your services. We want all our software because we paid for it. They transferred the software to us and I hired three people, Joe White, Dick Forschu (?) and Milton Johnson. And those three hires and their salaries plus the $19,000 for that equipment was less than what we paid Fraternal Services in a year, every year. So, therefore, when we had our own that’s when Joe White started doing not only the membership but then we did CMER. That was the other application on there, CMER. CME recording was on the mainframe for the membership. So the recording of members’ actual CME earned, in order to meet their requirements, among other things … Correct. Fifty (?) hours of credit every three years. So when Joe then took over, he started doing … CME accreditation was not on the mainframe. And that was difficult because these members were claiming credit for courses that didn’t exist on the mainframe. So we started to take accreditation and put it on the mainframe, then we did the catalog, then we did events, then we did all these other things. And most of this was written in cobalt and Joe and Dick Forschu then kept expanding doing more and more. I mean in home study they used to type an invoice for a member in two invoices. Each invoice was five parts because after they typed the invoice, then they would take one of them and they would have this filing cabinet and invoice number, then they would have this filing cabinet in alphabetical order by last name in that filing cabinet because they had to have ways to cross-reference it. So that was computerized.\n\nNow, somewhere around – well, when Bob Graham came onboard, then I asked Bob if we couldn’t do emails. And Bob, I remember, said, Well … And there wasn’t a strong demand for it at the time. He said, Let’s wait ‘til staff really have an interest in that. Okay, so the next year I asked him, he said, No, I still don’t see enough interest. Staff, not members or other organizations? Right, internal staff. And there still wasn’t a demand on it. But I had bought a lot of PCs, so this is an interesting point: So you buy all these PCs, how do you print? So we had printers on the various floors but we don’t have a network. We have nothing running these computers. There’s no file service. We didn’t have any of that. So you bought a PC and under your phone was a little box and in that box was a cast (?) side wire which connected you to the printers and it went through the phone system. So what you would do is, when you want to print your document, on your screen, in --, you’d say, okay, I want to print. Then you’d pick up your phone and you’d dial the extension of the printer, then hang up. Then you could walk right out to your printer to pick up the piece of paper. Is that why printers in the buildings that still have extensions? That’s right. That’s why every printer in the building has a four digit extension. It harkens back to, well, that’s what we always did, so that’s the way we always do it. So every printer has got a four digit extension. It’s irrelevant anymore, but it’s because that’s how we started. Now, then Bob eventually said I think we need to do email. So then I put together a bid of, okay, we’ve got to have file servers to store the data and connect the services. Then we’ve got to have all the wiring in the building redone. And it was a pretty hefty price tag and he couldn’t understand why it cost so much when all we’re talking about is sending emails. And that’s when I explained to him, yeah, but there’s no infrastructure in the building, so we’ve got to buy the infrastructure to bring it into the building. \n\nNow, eventually, in about ’95, ’96, the Internet was starting. And I remember that Bob had asked me, the students wanted a forum for them to communicate. So Bob told me that after one Congress. So I started contacting AOL, CompuServe and others to create this forum. And I remember AOL said how many students do you think will get involved and I said 1500 and AOL said there’s no reason to carry on this discussion, we sign up 1500 new members every hour, why would we help you put up a forum for 1500 people? No. CompuServe said, We’ll help you. And they wanted $5,000 a month to put up this forum for 1500 students. And if the students paid money to join, they would take a little bit off the $5,000, but we still had to pay $5,000. So I worked on it. I said, I’m ready, Bob, I can turn it in. He said, No, I told you in a year, so I don’t need the information yet. So I kept working on CompuServe, CompuServe, CompuServe and eventually I got them down to zero. So they would charge us nothing. So I wrote my memo. I remember, my daughter would have been in fourth grade, so that would make her about eight, so that’s twenty-two years ago. So I wrote this memo, I remember, and said, Okay, here’s how much it will cost to get the student thing. Dan Ostergaard is the one who takes care of the students, it will cost us $5,000. (Paragraph.) I really don’t think we should be doing this. This new thing called the Internet is probably a better way to invest our money. We probably should be doing at that, and, yes, we don’t have any money, but maybe we could get a grant from a pharmaceutical company and the pharmaceutical company could pay for the infrastructure and put up a web server. Was this at the time that there was that committee formed that you chaired? That was after. That was after, okay. Yeah. So, then, I remember I was on sabbatical. I got called in to come to a VP meeting. And Dan was sitting there and Dan said, Yes, you satisfied the requirements, you got something for the students, but I think we should investigate your last paragraph, don’t do what the students want, and I think we ought to develop our own thing. How much would it cost? So I came up with a dollar number of $150,000. So they went and asked … Bristol Myers Squibb came forward with $150,000. In fact, they did it for five years. So the first five years, we had at the bottom “Supported in part by a grant from Bristol Myers Squibb.” That $150,000 was enough to buy the web server, it was enough to hire Shannon Merit and Jeff Walweis (?). So the three of us took care of the web services and we got quite a lot of things up. In that first nine months we had the residency directory online, we had all the clinical guidelines online, we had the membership directory online. We had a lot of things online in those first months. But within two years we were starting to look at CME records – and get this: To get the CME records from the AAFP mainframe and put them on the website took twenty-four hours because you had to download it from the mainframe, that took twenty-four hours. Then you had to reconfigure it to get it … So we only put the CME records of the members up once per month.  They couldn’t make changes to it, they still had to do the old paperwork. So that, in and of itself, sounds ridiculous right now. But I had to have two lawyers look at what I was putting up on the screen because there was a fear that somehow we would be providing confidential information that our members could look at about themselves. So the website then tore off and went very well.\n\nAnd the website had two sites to it? There’s the public side that anyone can access and then behind a firewall, or what the right term is, is what an individual member can access across the Academy. Correct. As well as about his or her specific record. \n\nRight. And there’s yet a third one and the third one was what staff can do. Now realize that in about ’95 I had one group of staff, Joe and them, who took care of the mainframe. Then I had another group of staff, Shannon and them, who took care of the website. And whenever you made a change, and there were lots and lots of business rules … Whenever you made a change to a business rule on one side, you had to go to the other staff and say you need to make this business rule as well. And so I came to the conclusion that this isn’t working and the reason is because we had this system out there that was old mainframe and then trying to connect it to the Internet. Well, those old mainframes didn’t connect to the Internet. That’s when I came to the conclusion we need to go out and buy an association management system. We need to stop doing it ourselves. We need to stop writing everything 100% customized. So what we did is, I had another proposal and I asked if we couldn’t investigate buying an office shelf solution, which we did. And Bob was here at the time. And we got the money from the board, so that’s when we bought the association management software, Tass, from a company called Task, which was the association software company who sold the association software system, Tass and Task. And so we worked four years to implement that system. We used the waterfall method. The very first module that went live was membership. It took ten months. When we went through all the business rules, there were just so many business rules and customizations (they all had to be customized).\n\nAnd can you define what a business rule means?\n\nA business rule might mean you can’t apply to the Academy directly. You have to apply. We will then look at your application. We will then send it to the chapter. When the chapter approves it, we will then approve it for you. When you do apply, we’ll take your credit card number and we’ll charge your credit card number. We will give you a refund if you don’t make it. We will give you a refund, but we have to spend some time looking at it, so we’ll keep $25. So all these business rules are not something that anybody would have. So, in fact, it transitioned to Doug Henley coming onboard. So, Doug Henley, I’ll never forget, comes onboard and says, Why does it take you four years to implement an association management system? I said, because every time I have a meeting about the module, they don’t come. They don’t come to the meetings. So I sit there and I’m just waiting forever to get this done. So, I remember, we were at the Deer Creek Country Club at one of these first conferences and he said, I want this task thing finished by October. When Gordon calls a meeting, you go to that meeting. There’s no more excuses. Now, there was a division that had one of the modules that was left. I’ll never forget that. And Doug called me on the phone one day and he said, Gordon, they said they are way too busy and it will be a year before they can even start. So I remember saying to Doug, Doug, call them back and tell them this: We understand how busy they are and IT is committed to make this work. So tell them that IT will be here every weekend for them and they can come in on the weekends and together we can make this launch date. So Doug called them and called me back and said, Guess what, they think they can get it done by launch date and they don’t have to come in on the weekends. (Laughter.) So it was a plot, but essentially then we got it launched. Now, that was in ’96, ’97. But the problem still was … What Tass was, was a client server. And somewhere around 2005, ’06, it was becoming still inefficient because it sat behind, not on the mainframe but on client servers, more a PC architecture. And the data was still there, but you still had to translate it over here to the Internet server. And they required, again, double rules. Two sets of programmers doing the rules. So then somewhere around ’05, ‘06, that’s when I decided we needed to have one solution that took care of it on what we call today, the I web side, which is the staff side, and the E web side, which is the external facing to the members so that when somebody makes a change to a member’s CME records, it immediately is reflected on the other side. Or when a member makes a change on the E web side, their side, it’s immediately reflected on the other side rather than wait twenty-four hours and write all the programs to connect everything. \n\nSo that’s when we started saying, okay, we need to review all of our business rules. And Doug gave me two years to look at all the business rules. Everybody had to write down, from their module, there were thirteen modules … Everyone had to write down what their system did, document what their system did, tell us what didn’t work well and they’d like to change, tell us what they would like it to do that it doesn’t do and then give us a list of all of the reports they needed – and they had several months to do it. Then Shannon Merit, Gordon Schmittling, Melinda Hayes (?) and Joe Wright (?) read every one of those documents and we made huge business changes. We recommended things like from now on you can’t come to an Academy event and you cannot buy something from the catalog unless you paid for it. There’s no more credit. Up to that point in time a member could call in and say I’m going to that meeting, yeah, I’ll pay you, thank you, doctor. And you could buy something from the catalog for $1200 but you didn’t have to pay us. And at the end of the calendar year we’d say, Doctor, could you please pay us? And the doctor might say, No, I’m not going to pay you. And they’d say, okay, we’ll just write it off, because they didn’t want to lose the membership. So we changed that business rule and we said you pay as you go, that’s it. What we couldn’t change was something like, no, you get from October all the way through ‘til May of the next year to pay your dues. If you haven’t paid by the end of May, then we’ll drop you. We couldn’t get that changed. But there were a lot of things like that, that we said, no, we’re not going to do that anymore.\n\nWas this part of the move for the Academy to adopt more businesslike processes?\n\nYes. And now, if you want, or later in our interview, if you can talk a little bit about that transition, the interface, how well it worked or where the challenges were and so forth.\n\nThe first thing was, before you starting writing software you’ve got to get the business rules down. \n\nAnd that means beyond what your division is doing? \n\nYes. \n\nThat means the part of the Academy that has some business to conduct had to have well-established, well thought out rules? \n\nRight. So, for example, the software said you could ship things based upon weight or based upon quantity. But you can’t do both unless you want to customize. Well, the catalog wanted to ship based upon quantity. You buy three things, then you’re going to pay this much. But the journals wanted to ship it based upon weight of the magazine. So these are the kind of compromises you’d have to make. So we’d say, okay, we’re going to ship by weight but for the catalog everything weighs one pound; therefore, when you sum up five items, your shopping costs five pounds and five pounds means you’ve got to pay this much versus four pounds. So there were all sorts of business rules that we had to investigate. One of those suggestions, which was not accepted, was the last suggestion, and I wrote it: We have eight departments with eight supervisors and thirty-three staff, each processing their own set of invoices, each doing their own payment methods, each one servicing the members and so we have to transfer callers between departments. And I recommended that we do a contact center which would mean we don’t need 41 people. And that one was not accepted. \n\nThis is now side B of our interview of Wednesday, July 29th, 2015, with Gordon Schmittling. (The second smaller tape is running at a slower speed and it is continuing without being turned over.)\n\nSo many business rules were changed. Another business rule we said, from now on all invoices go through the lockbox at the bank. That didn’t used to be the case. People would have invoices with checks sitting in desk drawers that hadn’t been processed for six or eight months. Somehow they’d leave and when they were cleaning out the person’s desk, they would find all this stuff. So another business decision we made was every invoice that had a scan line on the bottom, anybody mails it in, it goes straight to the bank. The bank will process the payment, it will come over as a file. Accounting staff will take the file, apply it to the invoice number, apply the payment to the invoice. Nobody has to touch it unless it’s not the right amount – and then accounting staff can fix it. So that was one big change. And all these people, each of the thirteen modules had their own book. They got to respond and disagree with what I said and we would try and iron it out. If I disagreed with them, they disagreed with me, they knew that they would have their day in court. And so for an hour and one-half one day, all of these different people, there were thirty-five people in the boardroom, we went through this book. We went through every one of them and Doug would say, Okay, I listened to both sides, this is what we’re going to do. The last one was create a contact center.  Doug said, I don’t think we’re going to do that right now. Okay, that’s fine. Right now? Right now. Now, you might recall that Doug, about a year or two later, said, You know what, we need a contact ... No, we need to lay off fifty-staff. And this era is roughly? I’d say that was 2006, ’07. Yeah, probably about 2008. So this is where we discovered that the revenues were falling short of expenses and throughout the whole organization there was an examination of what could be done; including, for example, committees and commissions not being redone. And a little bit later let’s return. We’ll get to the past and talk about the research committee. Correct, plus there’s another committee I took care of. But not at this point. Let’s continue. So I remember going to Doug and I said, Doug, you’ve got thirty-three staff and eight supervisors doing different work. You could make that into a contact center and I bet you could have a major reduction in staff there. So then they said, Okay, Gordon. I worked with Donna and I was chairman of a project to try and look at a contact center. And the Donna you’re … Donna Deflin (?). So then I went out and found a vendor who did this kind of stuff. They sent in three people, I interviewed everybody. Because it’s not just talking on the phone, it’s doing all this business work. Because remember, in CME record keeping there must have been eight people entering all these CME records that members sent in on paper. But when we went online, they all had to do it only online. That can reduce staff. CME accreditation probably had five people who had to enter all these forms. When we put it online and said, no, the customer is going to have to enter it online, there was a lot of pushback saying they’ll never do that; they expect us to key it. Okay, I said, that would be fine. We will charge them $100 to type it for them. Not one person ever submitted a form saying I want you to type it and I’ll pay you $100 for it. And the accreditation, these are organizations seeking AAFP-prescribed credit  \n\napproval? Or elective. Or elective. And the whole purpose of that is our members need to look at that file and then say that’s the one I went to and claimed the credit. So today CME record-keeping, I think we’re at 96% of members report their CME online. They’re trying to get 98%. So this outside group helped look at our systems and everything else and came to the conclusion we need fifteen people in a contact center with one supervisor. So that meant you had eight departments, eight supervisors. All these people collecting their own money, all doing their own contact center for their module and a lot of those people had to apply for these new positions – and some of them saw the writing on the wall and just moved on. So that helped, I think, provide … It might be the bulk but it certainly wasn’t all the fifty-two positions that were eliminated. But if you do the math, eight supervisors, thirty-three staff is forty-one. And you reduce that to sixteen – there’s quite a bit of savings there.\n\nDoes this comment, in terms of the process, on what was happening to our members’ use of technology in the world … You had indicated earlier on that it was students who were sort of saying we wanted a forum. But obviously practices were changing, technology was taking on a different feel.      \n\nThat’s an interesting point because for five years I also took care of the ad hoc taskforce to investigate the use of computers in a family physician’s office. That was probably in ’84, ’85. The first chairman of that was Dr. Robert Taylor. I liked Dr. Taylor. A lot of times I looked at him … He and I traveled so much together at all these meetings and that. My dad had died and he was probably almost a father figure for me because he gave me so much advice on raising kids and everything else. Robert H. Taylor in Spartanburg. So he and I traveled a lot and we tried to find software that we could recommend to our members as a software they could use in that day, electronic medical records. And I remember Glen Aucherman (?) was also on that committee. Robert Taylor used the fact that he was on that committee to run for president, among other things, and he won. Glen Aucherman then took over and Glen Aucherman used that title in that thing, as well as the other things he did, to run – and he won as president. So we looked for huge surveys. We would travel and visit vendors. Some years we would have seven trips a year trying to whittle the number down from 100 down to maybe one vendor that we could recommend to all members. And eventually the committee got it down to three. And then they got scared feet and said no, I don’t feel comfortable recommending any one of these. And we had written a book and it was called “Guidelines for the Selection of Computers in a Family Physician’s Office.” And we used all of our RFP, we used all of our questionnaires, we wrote it. And I remember sometimes arguing about the difference between a system must have or a system should have and what was the difference between must and should. And I remember one time they asked me to go to the desk and see if I could get a dictionary so we could look it up. So we finished this document. We listed all of the vendors we looked at. We did not even name the top three. And the committee felt comfortable that they should not recommend one system over another. It depended upon the physician practice, too many variables, and they were comfortable leaving that. So the committee closed after five years of work with just a book. And then I think it went another year. Then in the next year I remember it was resurrected by the board again as an ad hoc taskforce. Chris Robinson took care of it for a year. It only lasted a year. And they looked at the document again and everything else. Susan Reame (?), I remember, was brought on staff and it was moved out of RIS down into Jane’s area. Susan Reame took care of it. Into practice, Socio Economics for Practice Advancement? Right. It was moved down there, Susan Reame took care of it for a while. I remember there was another gentleman who took care of it for a while and then I think he wanted to leave and left. I remember Rosie called me on the phone one time and saying how are we going to make this successful? And I remember suggesting to her that if you want to make this successful then stop hiring people like me who don’t work in a physician’s office and hire a physician who knows something about medical informatics, or something like that, who can make that work. And that’s when they hired Steve Waldron (?).\n\nAnd any sense of where the members were in terms of accepting, wanting electronic health records and recognizing the EHR, the health record part, there’s the business component?\n\nWell, that was the problem with a lot of the software we looked at. A lot of them were just management records, not really health records. There were some vendors who offered the ability to do health records. The problem was most of the members at the time, because they were solo intrepedors, they didn’t have that kind of money to invest in health records. Unless they were a dedicated physician who was willing to not make as great a living as they could because they were really interested in medical records, they really couldn’t afford that. And then the transition became that you really started working for other people. Well, when you started working for employers, they’re the ones who were responsible for using it and you didn’t have a lot of choices anymore in choosing software. So then, I think, it got out of the hands of the physician and went more into the hands of the big corporate areas who were making the recommendations of what to buy. So then the physician would just go into the practice and say, Well, that’s what I’ve got to use; I don’t have any choice. \n\nSo you’re at a point here where you have essentially told them they needed a center for health information technology type activity with a physician?\n\nThe only thing I said was, if you want to make something successful and this is where you want to go, you need a physician. I don’t know if other people told that to  Rosie as well, but it ended up they hired a physician and spent the big bucks to hire a physician to do it rather than just someone to more or less care-take it. \n\nYou mentioned that that was one of the member entities that you staffed, was this task force? The other one was the committee on research. And that’s going to take us back a little bit into the very beginning of your coming to the Academy. Because if I heard you correctly, you were saying they said we’re going to have a committee on research and come do that. Could you talk a bit about who was on the committee and what they saw their role was at that time?\n\nThey wanted to encourage members to get involved in research. But at the very same time, they had all these other commissions and committees saying we need more data. So it was difficult for them to figure out how they could get other physicians interested in doing research. So they actually went to the board and ultimately the foundation as well and tried to get grants, money, so that the committee could advertise, give applications to members so that members could apply for a research project. It could be as low as $300, it could be as much as $25,000. And they would apply to the Committee on Research and there was a subcommittee of the Committee on Research which looked at those proposals and then decided who to give the money to. Now, they wouldn’t fund multi-year research projects, they’d fund a year project and then hope to get the results of the study. And they had a lot of applications and certainly not enough money to fund it all but they would vote and score and pick the best winners and then announce those. So they were trying, at the time, to encourage research. They were also taking care of questionnaires. They also incorporated or decided why don’t we create a research panel (that was one of the very first projects) and we will invite members to participate on a research panel. Now, they didn’t know what the research panel would do, but they decided that they would have a questionnaire and then they would ask people to complete the questionnaire and from that questionnaire they could determine, they hoped, the level of research experience that the people on the panel had. So we would do mailings to encourage members to join the research panel. In the early years, I would go to the Annual Meeting, I would have a booth and I’d stand there for three days, and as people would come by, I’d ask them to join the research panel - explain to them what we were trying to do. So at the end of three years, they decided let’s classify the people because it’s a lot of questionnaire. We loved questionnaires in those days. They would fill out the questionnaire, then we would score the questionnaire and decide if you were on level 1, 2 or 3. Three meaning you’re a good researcher, one meaning you’re at the right level. So after we had our criteria established, we then classified everybody on the research panel and everyone on the research panel was a zero. No one even made it to one. How large a group are we talking about? I would guess it was about 300 to 500. So these are individuals who as members have expressed, through filling out the form, some interest in research? That’s correct – and trying to help the Academy do research. Do research. But they, themselves, may not be researchers? That’s correct. So I kept trying to get the committee to decide what are you going to do with this list? You keep sending them questions, questionnaires, but we’re not really doing anything with them. It’s kind of disingenuous to allow these people to feel like they’re connecting with the Academy because they’re on the research panel but there’s nothing for them to do. And so I eventually created a very small project, time management, and said let’s do a time management project with them and they call submit the data, then we can tell them what it looks like. Well, after the committee looked at that project, which was very minor, wouldn’t take a lot of time but would be an initial project, the committee said I don’t know that we really want to do this. Then I suggested, then why do we have a research panel?  And they said, yeah, you’re right, why do we have a research panel? So we decided to stop it, so the panel was shut down. I remember one of the other projects the committee had, they were trying to determine how to get members more involved in large research projects. And there was someone out of Dartmouth, I remember Claudene and I visited with him for two days, and we paid him to help us write a project, a proposal, of how to involve more Academy members in research projects. Now, he wrote a very good report. But then when he came to the Committee on Research, he also talked about this other project he was working on with a federal grant that sort of did the same thing. Allen Dietrich – that’s right, it was Allen Dietrich. And so the Committee on Research looked at his body of work that they had paid him to do and then in a separate document looked at what he was trying to do, I think was with the federal government, and said, you know, those two things really meld and I don’t know why we should proceed down this course when Allen Dietrich is already doing this. And so they decided to pull that endeavor and allow Allen Dietrich to do it.\n\nNow, somewhere in the mid-nineties, I believe Dan Ostergaard said, You know what, I think it would be better to take the Committee on Research, because it’s more interested in clinical research than it is in questionnaire research, and maybe we should move that into Dan’s segment. And I think that was given to you, Herb, wasn’t it? The Committee on Research was given to you – or was it given to … You mean to the Scientific Activities proceeded to be staffed as a committee by Jackie Admyre (?). Okay, so that’s how it transitioned from … Now, the point is, I said to Dan, I’ll never forget it, Oh, Dan, gosh, you know, that’s just terrible. You know, you’re taking away this work from me and then turning back going, yeah, yeah! Because I had enough work to do taking care of all the computers and I also had expanded a research and I had five people doing questionnaire research by that time, plus two groups of programmers and everything else. So to say that I would take care of that, that just never was going to happen.\n\nIt was going to happen but it wouldn’t have been done well. So I’m glad Dan had the idea, then all I had to do was say, Dan, that’s a great a idea – and Dan took it over. Now, what happened in that, I had a secretary called Frankie Mahafee (?) and ended up with a transfer of a committee, I had no work for Frankie. And so I remember that Frankie was laid off. I was probably one of the first people to actually lay somebody off. I also was the first person to hire a male as a secretary. \n\n(Tape stops, begins again.)\n\nI was going to comment briefly on my job positions. So I was hired as manager of data collection. Dan was promoted to assistant division director of RIS, Research and Information Services. Then I was promoted to division director of Research and Information Services which had the computer side of it, the information service department which started to help members find information. And then also the data collectors. There were four or five people who were collecting data. Then I was promoted to the director of IT, because we changed our name. The data collecting part, managed by Greg Tolleson, was transferred to Donna Valponi’s segment and put in Marketing. \n\nAnd then Accenture, I think in about 2010, 2011, came in and did a study on IT and they made twenty-three recommendations. And the first recommendation they made was that the Academy create a chief information officer. And I thought, Oh, gosh, for the first time I’m going to have to apply for my own job. And I know what the history is, you’ve got to apply for jobs. So one day Robert walked up and he sat down in my office, closed the door, and he said, Congratulations, you’re the new CIO. Then I said, Don’t I have to apply for the job? He says, No, Doug, Todd and I discussed it for minutes, then we said, no, you’re the new CIO – so congratulations. So I didn’t have to apply for the job. And that was Robert Wachinski (?) Robert Wachinski who was the CFO at the time. And I reported to the CFO. When Robert announced his retirement, I guess it was a year and a half ago, at that time I took the opportunity to share with Todd Dicus, the chief operations officer, that the CIO, based upon our structure, was used more as a person who’s there to control money because I reported to the CFO. And it would make more sense to report to the COO, so then I’m giving the technical perspective, and then let the CFO say I don’t think we can afford that. Todd agreed. So almost immediately when Robert said he was going to be retiring in about eleven months, twelve months, I was moved to the COO, which was Todd Dicus, so I reported to him. So my supervisors over time have been Claudene Clinton, then Mike Miller for one year. And Mike Miller stayed on as vice president and then when he became COO, or pseudo-COO, then I reported to Rosie, then I reported to Robert and then I reported to Todd. So I guess I’ve only had five supervisors. And that’s Rosie Sweeney who is headquartered in Washington. Washington. And had under her your division? Green Center (?), government relations, socio economics and IT. They started to split divisions back then by saying each VP ought to have four or five. When Accenture did their enterprise study, they said, no, the VP ought to have more of a … The divisions that report to them should have some kind of relationship. That’s when they split IT and had us report to Robert, the CFO. \n\nSo then Accenture came in after they did the enterprise study, they then an IT study and subsequent to the IT study did the journal transformation project. So Accenture was in here for three different studies. Now, when for the enterprise study, the Academy paid Accenture to do the study, then paid them again to do the implementation. On the general transformation, they paid Accenture to do the journal transformation project, then paid them again to do the implementation. On the IT one, they paid Accenture to do the IT study but then we decided to implement it ourselves. Now, they had some very good recommendations like the way we were structured at the time was probably a carryover from the way we were structured before and it hadn’t really changed – and they said you really ought to organize around plan, build, run. So Greg Belshe then became in charge of planning. So all new projects had to be put through the planning department. The planning department would estimate the time. The planning department would manage the project. The run people will responsible for building it. After it was built, then it was turned over. The plan, the build, the build people were responsible for building it. And after it was built, it was turned over to the run people to make sure that it works correctly – and that’s the way we’re organized today. Now, at that time a lot of the projects (we had so many projects) … And that’s one problem I think the Academy has always had, is prioritization, which project is more important than the other. And it’s been very difficult for the Academy and it’s recognized, how do we stop doing these things? So about two years ago we had so many projects on our plate, two and a half years ago, we couldn’t get them all done. And people were very frustrated because some of the projects have stayed on the list for a long time. We actually had a group of staff who met for six to eight weeks to try and prioritize everything,  and then we ranked them after we prioritized them. That was across divisions? Cross-divisional.\n\nOur problem was, when we looked at the rankings, they were like this: The first one got 28.75, the next one got 28.72, the next one got 28.70, the next one got 28.65. I mean it still wasn’t the right way to do it. So about last year, we talk about new projects as a rolling inventory. We will always have projects. We can’t get them all done. Todd explained to the VPs, then later to Congress, we have a pie, that’s our budget. A certain part of that pie, a slice, is allocated to IT. If we want to do all the project, then we have to have more IT resources. We have to widen the IT  slice. If we widen the IT slice, that means everybody else’s slice is going to have to get smaller. If you want all these IT projects done, then you’re going to have to figure out a way to cut your own budget because you’re going to have a smaller slice. I don’t think anyone was willing to accept that; therefore, Todd said, and Doug, we are going to start prioritizing projects. We are going to keep the slice for IT, that’s it. IT went through the Accenture study. It’s not IT cost containment, it’s IT cost optimization – using our money in the most efficient manner to do those things which are most strategic to the Academy. Well, now, how do you decide what’s most strategic? So what we did was include a plan which said we’re going to strategize or we’re going to prioritize different than what we’ve done in the past. And this was really when Dale Culver came onboard. I think Robert would have supported this, too, but he didn’t necessarily have the backing. Dale came in and said, Dale Culver  who’s the new CFO, came in and said, I don’t see why we don’t have a rolling inventory of IT projects. And Dale said on several occasions, If we only do five IT projects a year, maybe that’s enough. Well, we were working on sixty-five to ninety projects a year and we couldn’t get them all done and we weren’t doing them well because we had to rush them through the door so fast. No priority,  just do them all – and many didn’t get done. So when we established this new one, it was decided that the CIO would prioritize projects, the VPs would affirm the prioritization; therefore, strategically you got the VPs acting as the IT executive committee and they’ll make decisions about how IT staff time is spent and how IT money is spent. Then Dale created an unallocated IT fund, last fiscal year it was $800,000, this year it’s $1 million, and anything that comes up in the year that we are investigating, if we need money, it can’t be covered under the IT budget, then it’s covered out of this unallocated fund. \n\nSo I prioritize projects in this manner: Top of the list is what is necessary to run the business. Now, that may mean something like our phone system (I’m making this up) is eight years old. It’s not serving the members, it’s not serving the staff, it must be replaced. The vendor has said it’s end of life, it’s over, you’ve got to replace it. That’s necessary. So that’s necessary to run the business, okay? The next item is innovation. What is so innovative that it’s going to take the Academy down a new path, a new road, something we’ve never done before? An example of that might be the CME’s new performance navigator, which is a combination of the SAMs, it’s a combination of the educational learning system, a LIVE event. I mean that’s a whole different way of approaching it. And then after it’s all done, record it and put it online. That’s innovative. The next one after innovative is growth. Find out what you’re doing now, how you’re making your money or what provides great value and do more of it. So, for example, if the CME division is doing educational learning sessions on geriatrics, why can’t they do one on cardiovascular disease? Do more of them because they’re making more money – if it makes good business sense. So you’ve got must run, then you’ve got innovation, then you’ve got growth. And then the next priority in items is member efficiencies. An example of that might be when a member is dropped for lack of payment or lack of CME and they want to come back, right now they’ve got to call the contact center during hours. Well, that’s inconvenient for the member. So a member efficiency would be I can come online any time, anywhere, any device, and I can get on and I can renew my application by paying the dues that I didn’t pay. And no staff time is involved. As a member I do it on my time and it’s very convenient. That’s a member efficiency. Then the second to last item is staff efficiency. These are projects that are something like this: If you, IT, will spend $400 of IT staff time, I could save $15 a year. Well, the payback on that is twenty-five years, okay, plus the IT hours are much more expensive. Why would we do that? Well, you have to do that because I’ll save $15 a year. Yeah, but we’re impeding the process of getting all these other projects done because that one will take 400 hours. What has happened over the years is the staff projects went to the top because the staff projects, those people screamed the loudest. Right now the staff projects are on the bottom – and when we first did this, there were sixteen staff projects like that, all of which are at the bottom. Then the very last thing is something, like, wouldn’t it be nice if we had something like this to help us run the business? So that might be something, like, if we only had this new tool, we could provide staff an opportunity to listen to recorded messages and maybe they could improve how they talk to members on the phone. That’s an example. Not necessarily a great example, but essentially it’s wouldn’t it be nice to have. Well, maybe it’s not so nice to have. If you had all the money in the world and all the time in the world, maybe you’d get down to that level, but so far we haven’t. Now, after one year of using this new process, we looked at all the projects on the list and many of them are still on the bottom but we keep adding new projects. And we add new projects to the priority list, that means some projects get moved down because something new has been added which is more important – and that’s okay. At the last meeting of the VPs, I asked them to go through all the projects on the list and decide which ones have no meaning anymore. And sure enough, gratefully, four of those projects were killed by the respective VPs, that I don’t think we need this anymore. So you can imagine having … We didn’t do any work on it and the priority list merely means when IT staff  have more time, they go down to the next item on the list and start working on that and implementing that. And then after they get a budget prepared and staff estimates and everything else, they go back to the VPs and say we want to spend X number of dollars and X number of IT staff time to do this project. And the VPs then have the authority to say yes or no. Now, the great value of this is that staff no longer call IT and say, When are you going to get this project done? It’s been on the list a long time and I need this done. I’m sorry, you don’t address this question to us. Your VP and your division director have been informed that it is the VPs who decide what the IT strategy is. If you don’t think that is working correctly for your benefit, you go to your VP, your VP will bring it up at the next VP meeting. All the VPs will discuss it and if a change is warranted, they’ll make that change and if not, they won’t. But unless you go through your VP, it has no relevance to IT. We just work down the list that the VPs established. So with that kind of strategy it makes IT’s life much easier. There’s no more stress in IT because, after all, IT people like to have a goal and they like to work on it and they like to be good at it and they like to see the customer and the member satisfaction when they say boy, that’s really neat, that’s a great opportunity. And IT staff like it when they’re working on things that are most strategic to the Academy, decided by somebody else, namely the VP group, and then they don’t have to sit around feeling hurt or sorry that they can’t meet everyone’s needs because everyone knows we’re not going to meet everyone’s needs. It’s just not going to happen – there’s too many requests on the list.\n\nYou’ve worked for the Academy for 37 years. \n\nComing up in September. \n\nComing up in September. That’s under three different EVPs. \n\nFour: Roger Tusken, then Mike Miller for one year, then Bob Graham, then Doug Henley. \n\nSociety has changed, our membership has changed, the organizations have changed. Could you comment a little bit about how the organization under these different leaders, in these different times, has changed?\n\nWhen I first started with the Academy, it was under Roger Tusken. He was not an MD. I think back then the Academy was comparable to a family-owned business where it was very interested in your family, there was a lot of social get-togethers. It was normal to see in an executive’s office a bottle of wine or some glasses to drink out of. That was normal business culture. People smoked in their office and everything else. That was acceptable. But there was a lot more partying than is done today, etc. And I think over time it changed from a family business to a business with family values and I think today it’s changed to a business which respects the family. \n\nI think there’s a question here about when was the darkest times. I think the darkest times for me was … I was hired by Roger Tuscan. Roger was the EVP and the board at that time decided that they didn’t need Roger’s services anymore, so they decided that he needed to go. And I think there was a lot of angst among staff during that year’s transition trying to figure out what the new person would do, how the new person would change things and I think there was a lot of fear. And, of course, you had to wait a year. You didn’t know what was going on and no one shared much information with you. You just waited to hear who the new executive was. So then Bob Graham was hired. There was a lot of fear that Bob was going to come in and just change everything – and he didn’t. Bob came in, he was a great listener. He listened to what people said. He considered himself more of a consultant rather than tell you what to do. He would listen, give you advice and let you do your own thing. He was a welcome change in addition. And at that time, a lot of Academy staff said – under the previous administration, Roger Tuscan, I mean we didn’t even have an HR person on staff then. If you take all of the Academy’s employees and their families and you could sit them under the little, bitty tent in Minor Park (that’s where the summer picnic would be because it was close to Roger’s house, he lived in Red Bridge) … You could take all the Academy staff and all their family underneath that one pavilion, which is still there. That’s how small it was back then. I think there were 125 staff. And it’s grown, of course, to be much larger since then. But no one ever taught you how to be a supervisor. No one taught you how to project manage. No one taught you anything. When you got promoted, you were a secretary. The way to promote people was make them a manager. When you became a manager back then, we didn’t have computers so you had to have a secretary. Every manager had to have a secretary. Everybody had to have a Dictaphone and then you would dictate your memos. All the memos were sent through inner-office mail. So you could actually dictate something, put it in  inner-office mail. It would take three days to get to the other side, two days for them to read it, three days to write a memo back to you and then you’d have something on file. I mean think how long that took. Sometimes you wondered if you just couldn’t have had a meeting. We didn’t have any knowledge about how to run a meeting because no one had ever said, well, this is how you have a meeting. We knew how to do it for commissions and committees, but internally, how we collaborate and work together, those are things we didn’t know. And when Bob Graham came in, he hired a company called Tericon (?). And Tericon, I think, was with us five, seven years to teach us how to personal inventories like the Myers-Briggs or the colors or trying to figure out how you run a meeting efficiently. How do you do project management. I mean we would go through these courses like crazy. Well, finally someone was teaching you how to be a supervisor. And then with a more formalized HR division, they actually said let’s have performance appraisals. And what is that? And they taught us how to do that. And Doug Henley said if you’re  a supervisor the most important thing in your job is that supervisor title, so you need to spend time supervising, coaching and helping people be successful at their job. So I think the darkest days for me were back in the days right when Roger was leaving because there were so many unknowns and no one knew how to be a supervisor or how to coach people or anything like that. \n\nDid the nature of what the Academy does change because of the interrelationships that have to be there? Your division in particular, obviously, was a hub for all sorts of other divisions to do their work. But over time were there more committee meetings where people were made up of different divisions to study and inform the organization?\n\nYes. In fact, right about the time when we started this Internet thing that came about, when we got our first permission to run our own web server and start a website, at the time it was Bob Graham, we established an online committee of staff. And this online committee of staff then would meet to try and plot out a plan, a strategy for our website. Now, sometimes committees get too large. I think there were twenty-one people on that committee. And, you know, every division wanted to be represented, everybody wanted to have a say. I used to always say our website is designed based upon our division structure because everybody wants to make sure their division is represented on the home page. It was more like a filing cabinet. And then eventually they came in and created this new division, CDO, which tried to be more strategic in designing the website so that it was the member who drove what should be on the website rather than what staff drove and thought the member should see on our website. \n\nSo reflecting, in a sense, the same thing that you had done previously by gathering through surveys information about the members and then services and so forth be created - the website needed to be reflective of how the member thought the world worked, but they were interested in what they needed. \n\nCorrect. There were a couple of other things that I wrote down here, things that I recall. I mentioned the time when Roger left, that was disconcerting. It was also disconcerting to me to make a recommendation that says you can take forty-one people and reduce it to sixteen because in those layoffs I lost a lot of people that I was friends with. There was always something, when you got in a meeting with Academy staff, you could feel so connected because you were all doing the same thing, you were all working in the same direction, but you also were very interested in each other’s family and you were very caring and that. The other thing I could point out: Everybody, when I started working, had to wear a suit and tie every day. And when you lean over a desk all day, you had to take care of that upper button. And when I started there was no disability insurance, you got six month’s severance, for any reason, if you left. There were only seven paid holidays. You did not get off the day after Thanksgiving, for example. You didn’t get off between Christmas and New Year’s. So Bob Graham comes on staff and says we need a way to keep Academy staff because we’re losing so many to Marion-Merrill Dow which was down the street. So that’s when he started to say, well, we need to do things differently. So that’s when he said we’re going to start paying the disability insurance and, also, we’re going to pay for the contribution to the pension plan. Staff don’t have to contribute to the pension plan. And we are going to do a couple more things. So he started by saying we’re going to let everybody dress down the last Friday of the month. That was a neat thing. Then he started between Memorial Day and the end of Assembly, it was dress business casual where you didn’t have to wear a tie – and that was fun. And then after Annual Assembly, you had to start wearing a tie again. I don’t know if you remember this, but do you remember the year they took everybody – a consultant came in and said you need to increase the workweek from thirty-five to thirty-seven and a half hours? So we increased the workweek from thirty-five to thirty-seven and a half hours and no one got a raise including non-exempt staff. They got the same salary but instead of working thirty-five hours, they had to work thirty-seven and a half hours. Now, two years later they said maybe that was the worse thing we did because it was a morale problem. But I do remember what happened: They said we’re going to raise it from 35 to 37 ½ hours and we’re not going to increase salaries but what we are going to do is do business casual all year, then every Friday you get to dress down. As if to say this is what we’re giving you - you don’t have to wear a suit and tie anymore unless we have guests in the building, but we’re not going to give you a salary increase. And I remember that specifically. So that was something that I thought was funny. \n\nMy memory was that one senior staff had invested heavily in his wardrobe and wasn’t so happy with being business casual. \n\nI remember one woman who said, well, if the men get to wear business casual and don’t have to wear a tie, what about women? And Bob said to her, “Well, you don’t have to wear pearls.” \n\nIn the last moments that we have in this session, anything else that you would like to share?\n\nI think I’ve covered an awful lot. I’m proud of the Academy and what they’ve done for members. I’m proud of the fact that I shared somewhat in the success that the Academy is today. I hope I made that contribution. I don’t think it was on the frontline. I didn’t have a lot of member interaction, but listened to what the members told our leaders who then conveyed to IT what changes we want – and I think IT has been very successful in meeting those needs. And through the survey process. Uh-huh. Which was a step forward in being an evidence-based organization. Correct. And that’s one thing I’ve sort of done in the future. And before I leave, I recommended that they create a whole new division on business intelligence. When you recommend a new staff position at that level, there’s a lot of discussion, which I knew would occur. And so it appears to me that they are going to create a new division manager of business intelligence which takes all of this data at the enterprise level – I’m not talking surveys, enterprise data, and tries to analyze it better. Because what I think we’re missing here is trying to figure  out how do we stick those members to the association. We have no clue. And I believe that even though we know about 10,000 members have opted out of Academy email, I bet there’s another 15,000 to 20,000 who have marked us as spam and won’t answer our email, won’t even open it. I’m working on things now to find out who those people are because if you take the 10,000 and maybe the other 15,000 and add them together, that’s 25,000 who never open an email message. Maybe we should change the way we work and maybe those are the people who get printed materials and all the rest get the email because at least they’re opening it. It would save us money but it would also connect. So my hypothesis is that some of these people aren’t sticking with the Academy. By sticking you mean they’re members but they’re not participating? Yeah, they do not participate. They don’t even visit our website. They don’t even open our emails. So why do they pay their dues? We’ve got to figure out who those people are. Versus on the other side, we have to figure out who are those members that really open “Advocacy” because they love it or really open “Practice Advancement” type emails because they love it and give them more of what they want and stop giving them the stuff they don’t want to read because to them that’s how … We need to do more personalization and really do one-on-one marketing rather than 20,000 people get the same marketing piece. \n\nGordon Schmittling, thank you ever so much. \n\nYou’re welcome, Herb. 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