Hello, and welcome to today's new member welcome webinar, which is supported by the Society of Critical Care Medicine. My name is Serena Dine, and I'm a clinical pharmacy specialist for trauma and surgical critical care at Eskenazi Health, located in Indianapolis, Indiana. I will be moderating today's webcast. This webcast is being recorded, and the recording will be available to registrants on demand within seven business days. Log into mysecm.org and navigate to the My Learning tab. We do have a few housekeeping items before we get started. There will be a Q&A after today's speakers finish. To submit questions throughout the presentation, type them into the question box located on your control panel. And now I'd like to introduce your speakers for today's presentation. Our first presenter is Dr. Jennifer LaRosa, who practices at Morristown Medical Center in Morristown, New Jersey. Our second presenter is Dr. Daniel Wu, who practices at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Hospital, located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And now I'll turn things over to our first presenter. Hi there. Thank you so much for having me. This is Jennifer LaRosa. I'm a cardiothoracic intensivist at Morristown Medical Center in Morristown, New Jersey, and have been a member of SCCM since, I believe, 2001. And frankly, I can't say enough good things about the organization. I'd like to thank everyone at SCCM for this opportunity, and specifically thank Dr. Dine and Dr. Wu for working on this alongside me and for putting so much effort into our new member webinar. So I am briefly going to give you a little bit of an overview about MySCCM.org. So that's the website and what I'm going to be talking about. MySCCM.org is actually where you're going to go virtually all of the time to access a number of things that you're going to be doing with, at, and for the Society of Critical Care Medicine. So once you select MySCCM from the main website, it'll take you directly to MySCCM.org, and you can sign in there. You'll have a username and a password, just like everything else. There are a number of things you can do with the MySCCM tab, and we'll go over some of these. But amongst them are the fact that you can view SCCM news, including the latest and greatest things that have come out, and access to the journal. You can gain, oops, I think I went forward by accident there. And you can gain access to critical care medicine and critical care explorations, and we'll get into what that is a little bit. Let's see. Let me see if I can navigate these slides. There we go. This is a little bit of a busy slide, but it shows Amy, who's worked hard with us on this, what you're going to see when you get to MySCCM Overview tab. And this is really kind of the hub from which you're going to navigate to each of the different areas. So your member profile, you can see this has got a picture of Amy. It talks about where she lives and practices and does her work. I can't tell you how important it is that you update this. Put something in your Google Calendar or whatever, but make sure that at least once a year, you go in and you update this so that people can link with you on appropriate topics and appropriate medical centers, appropriate contacts, so on and so forth. Then there is the member directory. The reason that it's so important that you update your member profile is that this is where you're looking to find details about other folks. You can look for them based on name, based on location, based on profession, based on different areas that they like to study or that they're investigating. This is a critical segment for engaging with other members of SCCM. Then you've got the area that's known as self-identified expertise. So for example, my expertise, what I do every day is I'm an intensivist for a cardiothoracic group at Morristown Medical Center. I think we're the 20th biggest open heart surgery center in the country. That would be an area in which I would note that I have expertise. I'm sure that a lot of folks are putting down that they have expertise now with viral ARDS, but this is a very important area that you're going to use to let people know what you do and to network with other people in SCCM. It can help in terms of identifying speakers for different engagements, identifying appropriate committee members, and identifying liaisons to other organizations. The next segment is SCCM engagement. This is kind of neat. What it actually does is it creates a scoring system that can help inform both SCCM and people who are using this part of the website as to who might be appropriate. If I am self-declared as someone with some expertise in cardiothoracic surgery, that might be a way for the SCCM to identify me and to link me with other members of SCCM and also to refer me as a committee member or as a speaker or as someone who may be able to liaise with other organizations. Next we have ongoing learning. Access to critical care medicine, the journal, and access to critical care explorations. It's a very easy way to be able to get to both of those and to keep up with a literature. Then there is SCCM Connect, which is part of your e-community groups, and we'll talk more about those a little bit later. Then there's access to discovery. This is really kind of a research hub that you can use to not only tell people about research that you do, but also to identify others who are interested in similar areas of investigation. Finally, there's My Sections. You can join up to three sections every year. I think it's the next slide, but then it'll give you some examples of what different sections are and what you might be interested in joining. My SCCM My Learning tab. This one is easier than the last one. It's very self-explanatory. It's devoted exclusively, just as it says, to learning. If I go online right now and I buy access to a virtual ultrasound course, this is where I'm going to go to be able to access that course. This is also where I'm going to be able to go to get things like Congress on Demand. This will help me keep track of attendance at national and international meetings. This will be the site. This is important. This is the site from which you'll claim all of your continuing medical education. Okay? Oops, hang on. There we go. I'm moving forward. The next is My Involvement tab. This dovetails nicely with the slide from two slides ago. There's a fair amount of information here. This is what you can use to provide access to the Congress Session Builder, your ePortfolio, and your Creative Community application. For example, let's say that you have an idea for a future Congress session. You can submit a proposal here through the Congress Session Builder. You can also access your ePortfolio here, which displays a list of all of your SCCM activities, including teaching, CME that I referred to in the last slide, and volunteer activities. You can manually add and track non-SCCM CME activities here as well. If you're interested in applying for an SCCM committee, such as the Membership Committee, you can apply from this page. Applications are typically due by May 1st each year, so think about that for 2022. If you're toddling around and you're looking at the different committees and what you might be interested in working on, think about applying before May of next year. Applying to a committee simply means you're willing to work hard and learn. You don't have to be the world's greatest expert in membership, for example, to be part of the Membership Committee. You just have to be willing to be a part of a team and do some hard work. Last but not least, we have the Creative Community. This is the term that the SCCM uses to describe the community of volunteer members who make up the different committees, task forces, and workgroups. It's how members can volunteer their time and expertise to further the goals and the mission of SCCM, and all the success that you see us having at the various meetings and at Congress every year. If you feel like you have more to give to the society, you should consider becoming a part of the Creative Community. Members in the professional and in select membership tiers are eligible to apply to a committee. Like I said before, typically applications are due on May 1st, and you can submit them as early as August the previous year. Appointments are typically made in September. There are so many committees that span from research to diversity to program development to literally anything that you can think of, and you can also use these forums to suggest a new committee. Committees are a broader way of being involved with SCCM and can actually help guide policy development and recommendations regarding national and international guidelines. Sometimes it's useful to just join a committee and be a member and use that as a learning experience before you take on a leadership role. I started in my first committee with SCCM, I think 14 or 15 years ago, and have enjoyed a lot of different experiences and different committees and leadership opportunities since then. The number of ways that you can get involved and contribute to and be a part of SCCM are literally endless. With that, I will look forward to talking to folks more at the Q&A, and I would like to turn it over now to Dr. Daniel Wu. My name is Dan Wu, and I am a trauma surgeon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Southeast Pennsylvania. What I would like to talk to you about now is how SCCM can really be broken down into much more digestible pieces, because an organization like SCCM can seem very overwhelming when you just look at it as an organization as a whole. The first part that I'm going to talk about is sections, and these are professional groups within SCCM. The reasons why sections were first created is to make sure that SCCM as a whole has representation from various groups within its membership, and to make sure that each of these specific groups had a way of providing input to the organization as a whole. You as a member of SCCM are encouraged to select up to three sections. These sections will list on the next slide, but these sections are easily updated at the mysccm.org page, and once you log in, there's a portion on the overview section where you will see what your sections are, and you just click on that, and then you can adjust which sections that you are a member of. These are the sections that are currently available, and as you can see, they do represent a wide breadth of specialties that are integral into the organization of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. These sections aren't exclusive, so you don't necessarily need to be a surgeon in order to join the surgery group, and you don't necessarily need to be in training in order to join the in-training group, but these sections that are listed here will devote their efforts to promote those specialties in the organization in order to make sure that the Society of Critical Care Medicine provides a good experience and value to any of these specialty groups. Like I said, you are allowed to pick up to three. You are not required to, but you are highly encouraged to select a specialty section because that way you're going to get more information about a topic or a specialty that you may be more interested in. The next thing that I wanted to talk about is chapters. When I said on the last slide that sections were divisions of the SCCM, chapters are more like duplications of SCCM, but at a much smaller scale. These chapters are based on the regions of the country where members have decided to come together and provide the same opportunities and availabilities and promote SCCM at a much smaller scale. In order to find one of your sections, you would go to the sccm.org and go to the Member Center, and you will find a list of chapters. Members of chapters are able to talk amongst themselves, network with each other. These are going to be at facilities and institutions where you're much more familiar, and you might actually be within driving distance in order to get better in touch with some of your other members of SCCM. These are the chapters that are currently available. Some of the newest chapters are actually the Michigan chapter, the Midwest chapter, and the Delaware chapter, which all have been created within the last two years. The Society of Critical Care Medicine is very supportive of appropriate applications to create new chapters. If you don't see one that applies to your area, maybe you're going to be the one to gather some people together and say, you know what, I'd like to learn more and promote more about critical care and treating patients in your region. We definitely encourage the creation of new chapters. And don't feel like that starting a new chapter is going to be a monumental task that has never been done before, because the chapters themselves actually have a committee that is headed by National SCCM, which is the Chapters Alliance, which is a committee that supports all the leadership of all the chapters, and those chapters come together, the leaders from all the chapters come together in order to help promote ideas, as well as, you know, interventions, education, fundraising, things like that, amongst the chapters. So if you're interested in that, please look into starting a chapter if you don't see one that applies to you. Next area that I'm going to talk about right now is something that is described as KEGs, or Knowledge Education Groups. And these are informal groups where the discussion is more about a specific topic. So it's not necessarily one, you know, the chapters still have a wide breadth, the sections have a concentration, but the Knowledge Education Group, the KEGs, really are about a specific topic. So currently there are nine KEGs. I think Critical Care was one of the first to be created, and Obstetrical Critical Care is actually one of the most recent ones that have been created. But more and more of these discussion groups are being developed so that these groups can become a repository for information and research and interest in order to further the information and knowledge about these topics. And anyone can join one of these KEGs that interest them. The leadership of the KEG is initially created through the application, but anyone can join the KEG and help promote the expanse of knowledge regarding these topics. So what I'd like to do is to tell you, so how do you get involved, or how do you communicate with all of these groups that you want to be interested with, those sections, the chapters, and those KEGs? And the portal that SCCM uses is this that we call SCCM Connect. And like Dr. LaRosa said, when you first go to your My SCCM page, you're going to be able to access the SCCM Connect. Your previously selected groups will be listed there, and that way you can just click on whatever group that you're associated with, and then you can send emails to the membership of that group. You can connect to the member directory of that group specifically, and this way it will act as a bulletin board for people to ask questions and create discussions around. It also acts as an archive for documents and information that pertains to that group. So you can always go to your My SCCM Connect in order to send, to look for information regarding any of the groups that you've joined. And I know that people are worried about sending their own email out to a large group of people. So if you email through SCCM Connect, your email is actually masked, and you don't have a direct contact with someone in your group. It goes through the portal and gets dispersed via a private SCCM email, and then the information can get dispersed amongst all the rest of the members. So that's a nice piece of security that the SCCM Connect can provide. So I did want to say that one of the major benefits and where I really started feeling a part of SCCM is by attending a Critical Care Congress. So if you go to the SCCM website, you can look for the Critical Care Congress, and it'll give you information regarding that. Critical Care Congress is truly where you see the multidisciplinary nature of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. You have nurses, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, physicians, all gathering in the same location in order to work to expand the knowledge and healthcare of the critically ill and injured. So some of the benefits of attending Congress, you're able to do networking on an in-person basis. Now, there's something about being behind this virtual wall that we've all had to live with for the last years, and compared to meeting someone directly and engaging them by speaking to them about a topic that they may be passionate about, you're going to find people that you would like to connect with a lot easier because they're going to have these meetings of the sections or of the chapters at Congress, and you may feel like it might be easier to just walk into or log right into one of those meetings. It does make the large organization, you know, you attend the plenary sessions and you see thousands of people in the auditorium when you can, and then you see everything break down into smaller groups, and you get to meet people in a much smaller setting that is much more manageable. And you also get the opportunity to interact with the leaders of critical care. We have, you know, the world-renowned speakers that come to Congress to give the lectures, but they also interact with much more of the membership so that you can, you may see one of the plenary speakers at one of the meetings that you happen to walk past or at a reception. Attending Congress is probably one of my big suggestions to any new member in order to feel like they're going to get the most out of their membership at SCCM. Obviously, we want you to stay connected with the critical care community, and you can connect with SCCM and the critical care community through the number of social media outlets. The Society of Critical Care Medicine has platforms on each of these social media outlets, and you can connect to information and members through these social media sites as well. And it'll provide quick and up-to-date updates in critical care medicine. At this point, I'd like to return the controls back to Dr. Dine, and we'll begin the question and answer session. Thank you. As a reminder, please enter any questions that you have into the question bar. Our first question is related to timing for selection of your sections. So, there was a question if it's too late to change your choice of section. So, can that be done after you've renewed your membership? Dr. Dine, I'll take that question. You are able to change your sections. If you've already selected three, then you will—it makes things a little bit more difficult to switch your sections, but it is definitely still possible to. If you've only selected—if you've not selected or you've only selected one, adding another section to your profile is much easier. But the renewal—during the renewal process is when the major sections—when the major selection of sections happens. Thank you. Could you each also comment on what has been the best way that you've been able to connect and network within the SCCM community? We'll start with Dr. LaRosa. The truth is probably Congress, to be honest. I know that is not, you know, what we just reviewed, which is a lot of sort of IT. But I think Congress and going to lectures that interest me and meeting other people with similar interests and being enthusiastic about wanting to be involved have probably had the biggest impact on not only my career but my involvement with SCCM. Once you meet like-minded people who have similar interests at Congress, I think you'll find the rest kind of takes care of itself. Now, that said, I realize I'm pointing that out after, you know, 18 months of people not seeing a lot of others in person. I think that's certainly harder to do on a virtual basis. But I also believe over time, maybe not right away, but over time, we'll get back to doing things face-to-face. For me, I do have to say that Congress is probably one of the best ways to network and to feel the value of SCCM. But I think for a lot of people, it may not be feasible to, you know, travel all the way across the country in order to attend Congress, particularly maybe the year that you join SCCM as a whole, because you may just be coming, this may be your first year in practice, and you don't necessarily have the time or the resources in order to travel for one of the major conferences across the country. But so I do recommend, and how I really got started with leadership in the Society of Critical Care Medicine is through the regional chapters. It all started out by just attending one of the meetings that one of the chapters had locally. It was 40 minutes away from me. I just drove to their meeting. They had an educational session. I drove there. And from that point forward, they saw that I wanted to be involved. And at that point, things just sort of snowballed and continued to take on more and more in the society and, you know, move all the way up to, you know, chairing committees for the National Society. So if you can't attend Congress that year or this year or next year, then, you know, look for a way of connecting to a chapter that may be more accessible to you. All right. Thank you. Our next question, what types of resources are available within LEARN-ICU, and is there a way to find a resource that's relevant to a certain specialty topic? So the LEARN-ICU is really a library of educational materials. There are podcasts. There's presentations and articles in there, as well as some white papers and guidelines that SCCM has provided. So, I mean, they're generally categorized by different topics. Some of them are sepsis. Some of them are, you know, patient care related. Other ones are more administrative or regarding professional development. Thank you. Our next question, how do we access member discounts and what products are discounted for members? So I can take that one. So, obviously, you can't get to anything without logging in, mysccm.org again. Log into the store. When you search throughout the products, you'll find discounted prices that automatically come up. In fact, if you go on to SCCM and you don't sign in and you go into the store, you'll see the full price, and then you sign in and you'll see the member price. It'll show both. Discounts vary based on membership status, but it'll automatically populate. The professional and select members get the largest discounts, but you get pretty significant discounts at every level, especially the trainee level. So make sure that you log in. I have all too many times not logged in and went and bought something and then realized that I could have gotten it for significantly less having already been a member. I'm just going to dovetail onto that. I know that I think as members, you know that there are several tiers associated with the types of membership. There's the professional, the select, and the associate member membership tiers. The more you feel like you're going to be, the more value you can get out of SCCM, you may want to move yourself up from an associate to a professional tier or a professional to select member, just based on the accessibility and the utilization that you can have with the society and its resources. Next question. How do you join or subscribe to SCCM Connect Community and the affiliated discussion group? That's very easy to do. You just click on communities under the main navigation portal and click on communities that I can join in order to see a list of available communities. Click on the community that you've chosen to join and then click join, and it'll give you a delivery option for posts, real-time, daily digest, or no email. And like Dr. LaRosa said, that the applications for committees, if you want to be involved in SCCM and join a committee, the applications are accepted from August through May, and they are appointed by the president-elect of the society who is going to be taking over when you are starting into your committee. And I do want to say that SCCM very, very prioritizes the people that want to become involved. There's very few people that apply to be part of a committee that are not placed on some type of task force or work group in order to get them involved. So don't think that, well, this is my first year as a member, so I'm not going to apply because no one knows me, and so I'll never get on that committee that I want. You may not get your first choice, but SCCM does really try to get the people that want to be involved, involved into the organization. Our next question, how long after purchase are on-demand classes available? I'll take this one. I'll take this one. So in general, courses are available five to 10 days after the course, but for larger programs, pre-courses, master classes, those may be available for longer, and on-demand classes are available for free for any of the select members. So once you're a select member, you can choose any of those on-demand classes, and it'll remain in your purchased classes in your profile. Our next question, is there any way that you can automate the renewal process, and are there any benefits to electing this service? I can take this one. You absolutely can do an auto-renewal, just as you would for anything else. During checkout, you'll have the option to enroll in auto-renewal, and then it will automatically go through the next year, assuming that the credit card that you're using is still valid. I would just remind anyone who does this, if you have the opportunity to be reimbursed for memberships through your contract for whom you work, don't forget to submit it. You may be inclined to forget if you do auto-renewal, but it's very, very easy to set up for this. This is what I have, and you certainly don't forget, and it's nice to do it that way. And you'll still get emailed a receipt if you do the auto-renewal. So when you get emailed the receipt, you can always submit that for reimbursement if you have the opportunity for that. Thank you for both of our presenters today, and also for the audience for attending. This will conclude our Q&A session and also conclude today's presentation.

new member welcome webinar

Society of Critical Care Medicine

MySCCM.org

member profiles

SCCM Connect

member directory

critical care community