BOH agenda 012716 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Good morning and welcome to the _ Annual State Health Director's Conference. This is my 18th time participating in this conference, and my advice for those of you for whom this is your first is this: the presenters are amazing, some of the best you'll see no matter what conferences you attend; the food is better than average (except that one year they served fish ... well, we think it was fish); but it is the company which is truly the best part of the next two days. I've been a local health director since 1997 and many of you may know that I took an 18 -month sabbatical to move to South Carolina, where I worked with a great group of folks in Greenville to start and direct a statewide non - profit called the Institute for Child Success or ICS. ICS combines research and advocacy to influence policies which support children during that most important time from birth through third grade. That experience was everything I'd hoped it would be except for one thing: I was professionally lonely. I didn't have a network of people throughout the state who faced the same challenges that I could call with questions or just to vent. You know, that person whose board member /commissioner /employee is crazier than yours. Without that I realized all I really had in Greenville was a job. What I had in North Carolina public health was a family who provided the support I needed to return to a job that is the most invigorating, frustrating, exhausting, exhilarating, amazing calling ever. So my advice to you is to spend as much time with your public health family as you can. Hang out in the hospitality suite and sit with new people at lunch and dinner. Build those relationships which ultimately will keep you going through thick and thin. Make sure you use the time we're gathered here to do so. And since I have the podium for another few minutes, I will also share a secret with you: we all feel overwhelmed, unsure and scared when faced with a new change regardless of how long we've been doing this. You know what they say ... the only person who likes change is a wet baby. I imagine we'll hear about more new changes in the next two days and for most of us we'll wonder if dealing with this change will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Maybe, though there really isn't such a thing as a new change. Maybe it is more like when a marching band learns a new routine. Anybody here a band geek like I was in High School? In marching band, you learn 4 -5 routines each year. So the end result for the audience is a completely different set of moving pictures set to an exciting musical script ... a new routine. But for those of us in the band, however, each new routine mostly built on a skill set we already had. In my case, I played trumpet. I didn't have to learn how to play the trumpet from scratch for each new routine. I learned new music which built on my existing knowledge. I also knew that if we were marching in a square on the field for example, we did that in a very similar way to how we marched in a rectangle the last time, again building on my existing skills. Every single change we will encounter in the future will build on our experiences in the past. Are you worried about Medicaid Reform? Me too, but I also know that we've already experienced significant health system reform over the last 20 years. Think about the balanced budget act of 1997 or the terrifying switch health departments had to make to start billing using CPT codes in 1988. Think about how many health departments have electronic health records today when most didn't even have personal computers twenty years ago. I could go on and on ... but think about it. All of these big new