The Michigan State Medical Society Alliance is an organization of over 1,300 physician spouses, working together for the benefit of their communities, their families and the profession of medicine. The MSMS-A is a vital link in the federation of over 60,000 medical spouses nationwide, who strive to improve the health and life-styles of all citizens. The Medical Alliance at all levels (county, state and national) provides a forum for sharing information and concerns about the practice of medicine, the quality of health care and the stresses faced by the medical family.

• Work in partnership with the Michigan State Medical Society (MSMS) and the AMAA to develop, implement, and support educational programs that improve the public health.
• Educate about legislative issues that impact the practice of medicine.
• Provide support for the medical family.
• Serve as a resource for county alliances.

The role of information technology (IT) in Alliance action

We continue to support the legislative and health initiatives of the Medical Society in educating the communities we live in. IT is a valuable, effective and indispensable tool that allows us to do so and potentially reach a wider audience.

Every fall the Alliance traditionally distributes our books on bullying for SAVE Day (Stop America’s Violence Everywhere). Books are distributed in schools, churches, daycares and primary care offices throughout the state. Our collaboration with Kevin Epling (father of Matt Epling for whom the anti-bully law is named after) has helped get the word out statewide. This initiative has helped sensitize everyone to this important issue. We should use IT to spread the word to our membership and the community as a whole through facebook, websites, email, and the like.

Furthermore, the Alliance now has an opportunity to join hands with the school districts that have until June to turn in their anti-bully policies.

 Our “I Can Be Healthy” books are coloring books for children. The books focus on healthy eating for school age children. We have distributed these books in all of our active counties – targeting students in grades 3-5, financially challenged families with children and pediatric patients with chronic diseases through primary care offices. This supports the MSMS initiative to battle childhood obesity. We should transition these positive messages to IT formats like smart phone APPS, smart pads, etc. to maximize our reach and effectiveness.

Presently, we are working on domestic violence and mental health tool kits for primary care offices. Working in my husband’s clinic, I have noticed these patients can virtually shut down a clinic during a crisis. Yes, resources already exist in many communities but the information is dense, unwieldy, and there is no worked out coordination process with the end-user. Thus, the tool kit will have information on organizations in the area that are willing and able to work with the physician office during and after the patient’s appointment. We are enthusiastic about our mental health tool kit as we see this as a natural progression of our anti-bully program. These toolkits should be presented in simple modular IT formats for ease of use and accessibility to physicians and their staffs when they actually need them.

We should and will continue to use IT (email, SKYPE, phone conferencing, go-to-meeting, facebook, etc.) to communicate across counties, states, the country, and the across continents in doing our Alliance business. Nonetheless we should make the push to be a conduit between the community and our physician spouses by creating and using robust information technology tools like those discussed above.

- Felicity A. Thompson(Immediate Past President)