Committee Members: Antoine Curtis, Galyn Damiani, Kelly Hornbacher, Erika Martin, MJ Orellano, Alex Palleschi, Tariq Qureshi, Jim Shea, Stacey Snodgrass, Kathy Tobin (chair), Melissa Klingberg (NERVES).
The Education Committee is responsible for creating educational opportunities for NERVES members throughout the year. The NERVES Education Committee worked especially hard over the past year to bring educational material to our members in the absence of 2020 Annual NERVES meeting and the delay in the 2021 meeting. The Education Committee chooses monthly webinars based on surveys sent to the membership as well as “hot topics” discussed on the NERVES listserv. The Education Committee is always looking for new members. We meet less than one hour per month and you have the option of moderating the monthly webinars. If you want to get involved on a NERVES committee, we welcome your participation.
Wow, it’s been an incredible year! The silver lining with COVID-19 is most organizations have successfully moved toward virtual meetings and the technology supporting those meetings has improved greatly. To date, the committee has held 12 webinars and is actively working on topics for the remainder of the calendar year. Registrations for the webinars have ranged from 26 to 91, with as many as 30 members listening to the recording of a specific webinar after its live date. In April, the education committee worked with the annual meeting committee to put on a half day virtual conference to replace the annual meeting which has rescheduled till August 2021.
Similar to the survey sent in December, will we be sending out another survey to get feedback from each of you of what topics you would like to hear about. If you would like to present a topic, we would love to work with you on it. Topics completed to date include: Socio-Economic Survey, PPP and Stimulus Reporting Requirements, Services Line Models for Neurosurgical Practices, How to Manage Your Revenue Cycle in Uncertain Times, Combined NSU/Ortho Spine Programs, Spine Center of Excellence, Washington Post-Election Update, Top Coding Mistakes, ASR and Joint Commission Advance Spine Accreditation, Mini Conference, Tracking Surgical Supplies and Optimizing Operations.
If you have other requests, please send them to any of the education committee members listed above. If you would like to join the education committee, please send an email to [email protected].
A special thank you to Melissa Klingberg who has spent countless hours organizing our webinar speakers, making sure our webinar speakers get their presentations prior to the webinars, managing technological challenges during the webinars, and sending information out after the webinars. The Education Committee can’t thank you enough!!
The 2021 NERVES Survey questionnaire will be delivered to the membership very soon! With the help of the Survey Committee and the KSM team, we have planned to provide survey results that not only highlight the impact of the COVID pandemic on our practices but also preserve the collection of normalized, historical data points. We want the survey tool to provide meaningful results that do not have to be addressed with asterisks! In short, we will be asking several COVID-related questions about relief funding, staffing & the financial impact of the pandemic. Don’t worry, we are planning for ways to help you answer these questions in the form of a checklist, “survey office hours” staffed by veteran members & perhaps more. Stay tuned for the details.
Our editorial committee has been actively working, discussing content to include in this issue of the Transmitter e-newsletter, then drafting, editing and finalizing. The e-newsletter for NERVES is produced 3 times per year. The committee had also continued to encourage our members to publish in industry journals. We routinely ask members to report on their publications so that we can keep a historical record for NERVES.