Colorado Governor's Newsletter March 2025

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Gail E. Mizner, MD, FACP, ACP Governor

Gail E. Mizner, MD, FACP, ACP Governor

 

GOVERNOR’S CORNER

Wow, the world has been an eventful place since my last letter on November 1st! Among other things, we face threats to defund Medicare and Medicaid, decrease the availability of effective vaccines, and dismantle the NIH. I hope all of you are coping with this chaos as well as possible whether that is by burying your head in a good book, digging into your clinical work, enjoying the great outdoors, spending time with friends and family, or writing to your representatives. If advocacy is one of the things that helps you thrive, please see the exciting news under the advocacy section of this newsletter.

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EDUCATION

Chapter meetings:

Our chapter meeting on February 7-8 was a great success with 115 live attendees and 8 virtual. In addition to consistently excellent talks by faculty from various parts of Colorado, we had 4 resident oral presentations and a poster session.

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Our 2026 Chapter meeting will be February 6-7, 2026 at The Broadmoor. Please tell your friends and mark your calendars NOW!

National meeting:

It's not too late to register for the National ACP meeting in New Orleans April 3-5 with pre-meetings April 1-2. To register, go to https://annualmeeting.acponline.org/.

If you are going to be in New Orleans, please join us at the Audubon Aquarium on Friday April 4th from 6-9 pm for our joint Colorado/New Mexico reception.

Residents/Fellows activities:

Congratulations to Dr. Julia Small from the University of Colorado who won this year's Governor's Choice Award for her presentation titled - The Unmet Healthcare Needs of Adult Patients Adopted in Childhood: What Adult Medicine Providers Need to Know. Dr. Small was one of the 4 resident presenters at our chapter meeting and will also travel to New Orleans to attend the national meeting!

Congratulations to the winners of our recent Doctor's Dilemma competition: Parkview Internal Medicine Residency! Drs Mahnam Khizer, Ayushi Mendiratta, David Okugbaye, and Shan Tandon were all part of the winning team and will be traveling to the National meeting in New Orleans to represent Colorado.

This year's Residents/Fellows Competition will be held on May 1st at St Joseph's Hospital. All CO ACP members are welcome to attend.

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ADVOCACY

Here's the exciting news: Our Colorado Chapter applied to participate in a National ACP pilot program to help increase state-level advocacy, and out of 20 applicants, we were one of the 5 chapters selected! We have already started working with AdvocacySmiths, the consultants hired by National. They have proved to be thoughtful, knowledgeable and collaborative and have outlined a 3-part program:

  • 1) Strategic Planning Committee: We have selected a strategic planning committee of 9 CO ACP members including Dr Downs, the HPPC chair, and myself which met on Feb 20th and again on March 10th. In our first meeting, we identified the issues we wanted to consider taking a lead on in our state level advocacy. In the second meeting we did the hard work of narrowing those 13 issues down to one, and the winner is…drum roll please…vaccines! We feel that working proactively to protect the vaccine supply for our patients and prevent potentially harmful legislation regarding vaccines is something our CO ACP members can all support. We will have 3 more monthly planning sessions in April, May and June to fine tune our strategy and identify legislators and other organizations with which to collaborate.
     
  • 2) Advocacy 101: AdvocacySmiths will be offering an educational session on basic advocacy for all our Colorado ACP members on March 24th at 7 pm. If you are interested, please use this link to join! https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82375055397?pwd=ZGdaWVa4laqwDtNLHpSx5AtzBmX7un.1&from=addon Meeting ID: 823 7505 5397 and Passcode: 581257.
     
  • 3) State Lobby Day: We will have a planning session in early June in combination with the Wisconsin and Maryland Chapters with the goal of creating a yearly State Lobby Day (similar to Leadership Day in DC) during the Colorado Legislative Session starting in 2026.

Meanwhile, the Health and Public Policy Committee continues to meet every 2 weeks during the 2025 legislative session to discuss bills that are being considered at the Colorado State House and give recommendations to our partners, the Colorado Medical Society. If you are interested in being a part of those discussions, please contact Dr Dave Downs: davedowns1@me.com

On the National level, ACP is working hard to protect patients and physicians. Their 2025 policy and advocacy priorities include Physician Payment, Administrative Burden, Access to Care, Patient-Physician Relationship, Workforce, Digital Health, Prescription Drug Access, Public Health (including immunizations), and Scope of Practice. To learn more about National level ACP advocacy and how you can get involved, visit ACP Advocacy | Health Policy Issues and Health Care Reform or Where We Stand.

Leadership Day in DC will take place this year on April 28-29. We already have a robust team signed up to go. If you are interested, the deadline for hotels is April 3rd and registration is April 10th. Register HERE.

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COLLEGIALITY AND MENTORSHIP

In these turbulent times, we need each other's wisdom, empathy, and counsel now more than ever. I learn so much every time I talk with a CO ACP member. Chat with the Gov is still available. Just email me at gailmiz@msn.com to arrange a time.

The awards we give out at the chapter meeting are a way of acknowledging and celebrating our colleagues for their wonderful contributions to the House of Medicine. Many thanks to the Awards Committee for their hard work in selecting this year's winners from among so many excellent candidates. The awards were presented at our chapter meeting in February:

ACP Colorado Chapter Laureate Award—Jennifer Stichman, MD, FACP

ACP Colorado Chapter Robert B. Gibbons, MD, MACP Distinguished Medical Educator Award—Teresa Braden, DO, FACP

ACP Colorado Chapter Joel S. Levine, MD, MACP Distinguished Healthcare Advocate Award—Mark Matthews, MD, FACP

ACP Colorado Chapter Award for Excellence in Rural Health Care—Robin Richard, MD, FACP

ACP Colorado Early Career Physician Award—Matthew Moles, MD, FACP

ACP Colorado Early Career Physician Award—Eric Seger, MD FACP

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ACP Colorado Chapter Award for Excellence in Rural Health Care awardee Dr. Robin Richard & Dr. Karla Demby.

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ACP CO Governor Dr. Gail Mizner & ACP CO Laureate Awardee 2025 Dr. Jennifer Stichman

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Dr. Aaron Calderon and ACP Colorado Early Career Physician Awardee Dr. Eric Seger

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ACP Colorado Chapter Joel S. Levine, MD, MACP Distinguished Healthcare Advocate Awardee Dr. Mark Matthews and Immediate Past Governor Dr. Al Steinmann.

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ACP Colorado Early Career Physician Awardee Dr. Matthew Moles with Dr. Jennifer Stichmann.

We also like to celebrate our colleagues for their activities outside of medicine, so this year we added an Arts Corner to our chapter meeting. We had 3 talented artists display their works: Dr. Alan Aboaf, Dr. Kevin Lutz, and Dr. Raymond La.

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GOVERNANCE

We have had a few changes in our committee leadership. After her extraordinary work reorganizing and streamlining the work of the Awards Committee, Dr. Deb Parsons resigned as the committee's chair, and Dr. Jen Ziouras has kindly agreed to take over. In addition, Dr. Megan Hiles has joined Dr. Mugabe Walker as co-chair of the Membership Committee, Dr. Nick Breitnauer has joined Dr. Juan Lessing as co-chair of the CECP (Committee of Early Career Physicians) and Dr. Janna Gelderman-Moffett is undergoing training as a Well-Being Champion and will join Dr. Julie Cohen leading the Well-Being committee.

We have 5 committees that would welcome new members: Finance, Membership, Well-Being, CECP, and HPPC. Below, I have listed the chairs of all the committees and their contact info. Please feel free to reach out to the chairs or to our Executive Director Colleen Keeku. colleenkeekuacp@gmail.com

We need your feedback! One of the governance issues we are trying to address is the high cost of our chapter meeting at the Broadmoor. We made a few changes this year regarding food and drink that seemed to be well accepted but anticipate needing to take other cost-saving measures in the years to come which would include increasing the registration price. In addition, we recognize the difficulty that some of our Western Slope members face in traveling 5 hours or more in the height of the winter season to attend the meeting. We polled the attendees at the recent meeting about their attitudes regarding increasing registration costs vs changing the location of the meeting, and they overwhelmingly voted to keep the meeting at The Broadmoor and increase registration fees. However, we want to hear from those of you who weren't at the meeting! Please look for and respond to a poll that will be sent out within the next month.

My thanks and gratitude to all of you!

Gail

Gail Mizner, MD, FACP, AAHIVMS
Governor, Colorado Chapter of the American College of Physicians

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