Thu, 03/03/2022 - 09:16
President's Message
Randy Pardell, MD, DLFAPA
As my year as your president of the CTMSS is quickly passing, I wanted to share with you updates on the progress of our society in the 2021-2022 year. At the Strategic Planning Meeting in June of last year, our Board of Directors outlined a sweeping plan to energize our society and fulfill our mission of "optimizing clinical practice, awareness, and accessibility of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation therapy." Towards this end, the board set out a number of goals that our standing committees have been working on, and many of these have already come to successful completion.
The first goal was to encourage and develop a resident and student curriculum for TMS therapy. A subcommittee of our Education Committee led by Suzanne Kerns and Kristin Raj has completed 2-one hour lectures on TMS therapy that will be presented at our highly popular monthly Grand Rounds Series this summer. These lectures and slides will be given free access to residency and other training programs and will be available for our members to download and use to educate fellow clinicians upon attending these Grand Round presentations. Furthermore, a task force that combines with the Membership Committee is working on student and new member mentorship and will be coordinating matches between students/new members with established members of CTMSS to improve orientation to CTMSS and foster mentorship. This task force is also working on completing a curriculum on TMS to be shared with residency programs.
Additionally, the Education Committee under the leadership of Michelle Cochran and Debbie Stultz has kept active even during the pandemic and has safely held two PULSES courses in Nashville last September and in Las Vegas in January with nearly 170 total attendees participating in the best hands-on clinical TMS training course in the world! The Education Committee and Board of Directors wanted to make PULSES more accessible to technicians, and as of the Las Vegas PULSES course in January, there is a new non-prescriber rate for attendees that has made our PULSES course more affordable for TMS technicians to attend. The committee introduced the "Polls Everywhere" application to make our course more interactive, improve the Questions and Answers section, and allow real-time speakers and course content reviews. We fulfilled the mission of increasing awareness of TMS therapy for future practitioners and encouraging active CTMSS membership of early-career clinicians by celebrating 12 scholarship winners at these meetings who were residents/students in psychiatry and attended the course free of charge. To further increase our international outreach efforts, the Education Committee has met with our Australian colleague Samir Ibrahim to organize a PULSES course in Australia in February 2023. Additionally, a task force is also being formed to consider a PULSES course in Taiwan. We will also be holding our PULSES course before the Annual Meeting in May in Chicago and are planning a fall course in California.
The board stressed increasing community awareness of TMS, and the Outreach Committee under the direction of Saydra Wilson and Nate Upshaw and its website task force have added a Doodle video for patients to learn about the difference between TMS and ECT featuring the melodious narrator's voice of our board member Bob Sammons. The task force has updated the patient information page on our website, and working with our administrative company Exchange will be redesigning our website. The website will improve the landing page to make the site more intuitive and user-friendly for both patients, members, and fellow clinicians.
The Outreach Committee had established a listserv in the Fall of 2021. However, there were grievances filed from posts on the listserv. The Board of Directors paused the listserv, then the Legal, Business, and Ethics Committee reviewed and responded to the grievances. The Outreach Committee recognized the importance of our members wanting to continue communicating securely and established a task force on the listserv at the Board of Director's request. The task force and the Outreach Committee have decided to build a more excellent utility of the already established Forum on the Members Dashboard. The Forum is where members can continue to communicate with each other securely. With the website revision, the Forum will receive improved functionality and access. Look for further announcements on this important service during our Grand Rounds presentations and in TMS Today e-blasts.
The Membership Committee has been active in recruiting new members, and the board set the ambitious goal of enrolling 1000 members by our Annual Meeting. As reported at our last board meeting in February, membership is up by 36% from last year, and we are now over 920 members strong and closing fast on the 1000 member goal. Chairs of the committee, Rebecca Cohen and Ken Goolsby, are reaching out to international members and learning how our society can be more responsive to the needs of our members outside of North America. We are looking forward to increasing the international membership to a higher percentage of our society.
With inspiring news, I am pleased to announce the Membership Committee and its task force have developed the criteria for a "Fellow" designation of the CTMSS. They have further reviewed applications and have voted on the application list with suggestions that the Board of Directors then approve our first class of Distinguished Fellows of the Clinical TMS Society. Eighteen of our members who have been leaders within our society and the TMS field will be honored at our Annual Meeting in Chicago. We will be holding a 10th Anniversary Gala Dinner, and Fellows Convocation on Friday, May 13, 2022, at 8 pm at the Mae District venue, and our Fellows will receive their medallions at the Gala. Afterward, there will be an exciting lecture given by APA President-elect Rebecca Brendel MD, JD, who will detail the challenges and opportunities for psychiatry in the next decade. The Executive Committee has met with Dr. Brendel in December, and it was a highly productive meeting! Our board decided to subsidize the event to make the cost of a ticket more reasonable so that our members and their guests can attend. Please sign up for the Gala dinner as soon as possible as the tickets will be going fast. We hope to influence the APA to include more lectures on TMS at the APA Annual Meeting. Our ACROSS APA representative, Michelle Cochran, will continue to advance this effort of increased exposure to TMS in psychiatry.
The Annual Committee and its chairs Johnny O'Reardon and Bob Sammons have organized an extraordinary academic and clinical meeting in Chicago with Anthony Barker, Mark George, and Jeff Daskalakis presenting. More importantly, the committee has fulfilled the board's desire for greater diversity in our speakers' backgrounds, and for the first time, nearly half of the presenters will be women. Eleanor Cole, the lead author of the Green Journal SNT article, will discuss the latest update on the Stanford accelerated protocol. Shirlene Sampson will discuss exciting advances in the broader view of neuromodulation, and Colleen Hanlon will discuss the use of TMS in addiction, among many other offerings. We expect this meeting to have the largest attendance of all of our annual conferences to date. We are also looking forward to our 2023 Annual Meeting at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, and we are anticipating an international location for the meeting in 2024.
The Clinical Standards Committee(CSC) has been highly productive and has compiled several publications either in the press or published. Under the leadership of chairs Andy Kozel and Tracy Barbour, the CSC has also drafted a statement and press release that the Board of Directors approved on the SNT (formerly SAINT) protocol and underscoring optimism and the preliminary nature of the findings. The Membership Committee has formed a task force with CSC input on reviewing the training of non-psychiatrists (PMHNP, non-psychiatric MD/DO) who are legally able to prescribe TMS for psychiatric conditions. This task force will present its results to the CSC and the Board of Directors later this spring. From this task force, CSC will review the findings and include the information gained to clarify the recommended standards of a TMS prescriber. Furthering CSC's interdisciplinary efforts, the committee and the Insurance Committee have formed a joint task force on updating Practice Guidelines for Major Depressive Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to assist the field clinically and encourage improved acceptance and reduce the barriers for insurance reimbursement.
The Insurance Committee has been active in meeting with medical directors of insurance companies to increase access to TMS and reduce the barriers to treatment. Through the efforts of chairs Rebecca Allen and Rich Bermudes, CTMSS has hired a new consultant Dwight Johnson Esq. of Coopersmith Law, who has already provided valuable counsel about how to influence insurance companies to change their policies. The Insurance Committee has seen some essential wins, with Optum and Nordion now reducing some of the burdensome requirements for TMS insurance approval. The committee regularly updates with its informative webinars and ideal policies available on the Members Dashboard. Look for more aggressive efforts on the part of this influential committee to improve coverage for TMS.
The Research Committee is exceptionally active and now meets monthly. The Affinity groups continue to be an excellent way for our members to connect who share similar clinical and research interests. A new affinity group on TMS and Pain has started. Chairs Martha Koo and Andrew Leuchter and the Research Committee have established registries for TMS use in pregnancy and recording seizures. One of the Annual Meeting highlights is the poster presentations curated and approved by the committee.
Ashleigh Servadio and I have been working toward establishing the Foundation of Clinical TMS Society (FACT), a non-profit charitable foundation to further meet the goals of our society. The legal and financial paperwork has been filed to establish the foundation, and we expect to have it ready to accept donations by the 3rd quarter of 2022. FACT will fund research, support community awareness, and provide scholarships for TMS treatment in underserved areas. We hope to establish bylaws, administration, and board of directors by the end of this year.
Additionally, there was a desire to have greater transparency in our leadership, and to this end, I have provided quarterly President's Messages in TMS Today to update the members on the status of our society. Furthermore, we have followed that up with quarterly New Member Orientation Meetings led by Rebecca Cohen and myself detailing how new members can get the most out of our society and what CTMSS has to offer. We have initiated an Annual Town Hall webinar in which I gave a status update on the CTMSS, and the chairs of all of the standing committees reported on meeting the goals of their committees. This highly informative webinar provides our members with the mission of each standing committee and forms a gateway where members can get more involved in our society. The New Member Orientation Meeting (for those who have registered) and Town Hall Webinars for all members are available On Demand on the Member's Dashboard on our website.
Finally, our society is in an excellent financial position through expanding membership dues, profits from the Annual Meeting, and the PULSES courses. We have formed a Budget and Finance Committee led by our Treasurer Rebecca Allen to manage our expanding financial resources. This committee will meet regularly and maintain our society's economic security and support all of our organization's endeavors. To keep the continuity of our efforts into the upcoming year, I have included Vice President and President-elect Mohammed Abdelghani in my weekly President's Meeting with our Executive Director Ashleigh Servadio. After my term in office, CTMSS will be led by Mo's aegis guidance over the next year, and we can look forward to a more significant international presence in our society as our first international president will be inducted at our Members Meeting in May.
As your president, I am pleased with the progress and growth of our society. It has been my distinct pleasure to lead the CTMSS this year, and I look forward to seeing all of you in Chicago!