The SGIM Council is just coming off our winter retreat in Birmingham at the site of the 2020 Annual Meeting. The retreat is an opportunity for us to spend time together to talk about issues of broad import to the society over the next few years. As always, there are many important topics to select from given the dynamic times in which we live and the broad reach of the work and innovative activity of our members spanning medical education, research, clinical practice, and policy.

As you all will recall, Council refreshed the SGIM strategic plan last year as part of our refresh year.¹ We crafted a new vision that clearly articulates our dedication to creating a “just system of care in which all people can achieve optimal health”. We also refined our SGIM mission to cultivate innovative educators, researchers, and clinicians in academic general internal medicine, leading the way to better health for everyone.² Further, we established a set of shared values to provide further insights about why we do what we do as SGIM:

• High-value, evidence-based, person-centered, and community-oriented health care;
• Attention to population health outcomes and their social determinants;
• Excellence, innovation, and leadership in education, research, and clinical practice;
• Interdisciplinary collaboration and team-based care;
• Collegiality, mentorship, and career development; and
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This strategic work reflected a series of conversations with staff, council, and other leadership over the course of the past year. It was a time when we reflected on how an organization with our passion, history and scope could make the most impact. Our conversations caused us to learn to balance our enthusiasm over doing many things—a clear trait of many general internists, with our need to be focused for maximal impact.

For this strategic planning process, we developed goals to ensure that our short-term actions would lead us to the long-term vision. As we all know, this type of work is not easy and there have been tensions about how to foster innovation and opportunity for members to bring forward new ideas—letting a thousand flowers bloom model—with a need to focus. Part of the process was to define the following broad long-term goals that would shape the work of the organization, guide Council and SGIM staff, and support work plan development by our Committees and Commissions:

1. Promote scholarship in person-centered and
   population-oriented approaches to improving health.
2. Foster the development of general internal medicine leaders in academic and other settings.
3. Ensure organizational health, including a thriving staff.
4. Advocate for our vision of a just health system that brings optimal health for all people.

Amongst the other work of the winter retreat, Council took the next step in this strategic work for SGIM and approved an enterprise wide dashboard of metrics and associated targets that will allow us to clearly set our course and have clarity about organizational success. The metrics and associated targets for the inaugural SGIM Enterprise Dashboard (see table). We developed them to guide Council and staff to allocate and balance our human, fiscal and other resources to achieve benefits to SGIM and to those we serve. We will spend the remainder of the 2019-20 year working to complete those metrics and targets that are in progress so that we will start 2020-21 as our first full year of implementation.

A few caveats about these metrics. First, the Council recognizes that these inaugural set of metrics are process-oriented and expects to progress them overtime to more outcomes-based metrics as the effort matures. We will evolve to outcome oriented as we get better at data collection and at agreeing on what the outcomes will look like. Second, this is a small set of metrics by design. There is a lot we could choose to track, but we want to begin (and perhaps stay long-term) with a parsimonious starter set for Council to review at regular intervals to track progress on our goals and towards our vision. This narrow set of metrics at the enterprise level does not mean that some verticals won’t have more detailed metrics that track their work. For example, the Finance Committee will still track meeting goals around maintaining 6 months of reserves.

Third, the metrics aren’t completely identified. One of them is the assessment of the impact of the career development programs. Members will recall that amongst many new additions to the SGIM staff is Dawn Haglund, in a newly formed role of Director of Education. Dawn joined us just a few weeks ago and will, in partnership with the career development program leaders, recommend a starter metric. We also are in development for a metric to track the workplace environment at SGIM. These areas are of high importance to the Council and the organization overall so even though we may not have baseline measures until 2020-21, we wanted to leave these placeholders to signal to everyone involved that we need to fill in these gaps by the end of May 2020.

I have no doubt that this will be a learning journey for us as we work to ensure that the metrics are truly guiding the work of the Council, staff and other leadership. One thing I am certain about is that we will need to continue to iterate this work over the next few years as we evolve and as the external environment evolves. Nonetheless, I am genuinely excited that we have taken this next step and set the course for a stronger SGIM and our ability to drive towards a just system of care.