And the Winners of the 2017 Innovation Award Are…
This year, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the American College of Chest Physicians are the first-ever winners of the award, with the Association for Corporate Growth as the runner up. Here is more about their achievements:
American Society of Anesthesiologists
The ASA made big investments and bold moves in leveraging digital technology to attract and engage members, improve clinician performance, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. ASA transformed its education programming and delivery by partnering with an organization to deliver high-fidelity simulation education in a 3D virtual, online environment—available anytime, anywhere. The result is education that helps anesthesiologists improve performance in anesthesia emergencies.
Before this program launched, the only way anesthesiologists could fulfill requirements for continuing medical education and certification maintenance was by attending face-to-face simulation workshops. This would mean expensive travel away from their practices and families.
Over the past year, the development of this program has caught the attention of international audiences and spearheaded numerous opportunities. For the first time, ASA has engaged international medical society leaders to become providers of online education. ASA’s education leadership has been asked to present at U.S. and international association meetings about the new program. These opportunities have driven revenue growth, more international customers, and recognition of ASA as an education innovator.
American College of Chest Physicians
CHEST established a new way to recognize its members, increase member engagement and manage volunteers.
CHEST realized in recent years that it relied too heavily on a limited number of volunteers who were growing weary of the time they were devoting to the organization. CHEST required member physician involvement in all aspects of education—in long-term planning, clinical scenario development, analyzing course outcomes, and even tasks such as labor-intensive equipment set up.
It needed a new value proposition for volunteer participation, in particular for clinician educators. This eventually led to the establishment of the Distinguished CHEST Educator designation. Designees are selected based on a scoring system that measures all 83 different ways for volunteers to contribute to CHEST’s education efforts. The inaugural class of 150 designees will be honored in October 2017 at CHEST’s annual meeting in Toronto.
There are many goals of the program. One is to help clinician educators demonstrate involvement in the profession, a criterion for moving from assistant to associate professor or from associate to full professor. Another goal is to build the bench of faculty to grow the volume and quality of education programming CHEST offers. To complement this effort, CHEST now offers faculty training programs and new roles for faculty-in-training.
Association for Corporate Growth
ACG underwent a complete redesign of its website, which included not only ACG’s core site, but also its 58 chapter sites around the world. The goal was to provide a seamless user experience across global and chapter sites, and ease the administrative burden on chapter and global staff. ACG turned to Sandstorm Design to create and develop a scalable web ecosystem.
Part of Sandstorm’s efforts included a four-part, hands-on training series for chapter administrators, with follow-up homework and tasks, to ensure non-technical administrators could become quickly proficient on the platform.
Since the site went live in May 2017, traffic has increased by one-third with bounce rates down by one-third. End users now enjoy a familiar, cohesive and personalized experience across all sites as well as a single unified login. Chapter administrators have more flexibility and control to include structured data from global but also local content. This is important as ACG conducts more than 1,200 events each year, with the vast majority executed by chapters.
