President’s Message

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3. Creation and development of the PSG Webinar series: This has offered a wonderful educational opportunity for our membership, in addition to providing a CME opportunity, and it also feeds our Social Media efforts. Some of the content will be archived on the Website for future availability. There have been 5 Webinars in the past year, two of which moderated by PSG physicians, and three more with industry sponsorship. More are planned in the future. Of course, we welcome any ideas of topics for these Webinars.

4. PSG Mentorship Program: Mentorship is such an important part of what we do as physicians, and we are blessed to have an outstanding cadre of gastroenterologists in this state. I have created a program to link Mentors to Mentees in a variety of areas in GI including clinical practice, advocacy, and many others. While we are just getting this off the ground, I am hopeful that this will be an important service of the PSG to our membership and trainees for a long time to come.

5. PSG Website improvements:

It has been several years since our PSG Website had an upgrade. We have been working on this with the IT department and hope to finalize these improvements before the end of the year.

6. We expanded membership to West Virginia physicians: This was a suggestion from Dr. Thakkar, and since its inception, several West Virginia gastroenterologists and gastroenterology fellows have joined the PSG. Having the PSG Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh will certainly continue to promote membership among our West Virginia colleagues and serve to expand PSG further.

7. PSG-sponsored Research Grant Competition:

This initiative was created by the PSG Board and sets aside $25,000 to fund 2 grants in the following areas:

(1) Increasing access and utilization of colorectal cancer screening, and

(2) Improving value in endoscopic care delivery. We will be funding our first grant this year, and the grant winner will be invited to present their research at the Annual Meeting the following year.

8. PSG Co-Sponsorship (with Medtronic) of the annual video capsule endoscopy course: It was held this past March in Danville and was well attended by faculty and fellows from many hospitals in Pennsylvania. This was nicely organized by Dr. Harshit Khara, and led by Dr. David Haas, who is recognized as a leader in this field. Our plans are to reprise this on an annual basis.

9. PSG Membership Group Discount Program:

The PSG has developed a program to promote membership by allowing a group discount for multiple members from the same practice. A few groups have taken advantage of this, and we hope to increase the number of members through this program as more practices learn about it.

10. Increased Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) awareness: The PSG Board composed and approved a DEI statement for the PSG for the first time in its history. While this is a big step, more is needed to be done. The PSG is committed to pursuing goals of inclusion and will be looking to increase diversity in membership and board representation going forward.

Some special acknowledgments are in order. I would like to thank David Sass for nominating me to the PSG board so many years ago, Richard Moses and Wilson Jackson for providing inspiration for leadership in this role, and Ravi Ghanta for his unwavering support and help to me in his role as immediate past President. I also am grateful to our very active board members for their significant time commitment. The Education Committee in particular has been very active with ad hoc meetings to drive forward several of the initiatives and projects listed above.

The future of the PSG is stronger than ever, and we hope to continue to drive membership with increased social media engagement, particularly with inclusion of GI fellows through Pennsylvania and West Virginia.