Four Ways AHIMA is Listening to Members and Taking Action
Relationships are built on trust, and trust is earned through making important promises and delivering on them.
AHIMA is doubling down on relationship management. I’ll emphasize that we have returned our focus to our greatest priority and most important relationships: our members, those we certify, and our component association leaders.
Important promi
Customer Relations: We have executed the plan to reclaim our relationship with members by retiring our outsourced customer service call centers. We are training our wonderful personnel on our new approach and have purchased a platform that will support the operational functions of supporting the mission-critical transition to an in-house member-focused customer service experience.
Membership Townhall: We were so very excited at the wonderful turnout of the first AHIMA membership townhall in June. With over 1,700 registered and nearly 1,000 who actually attended, we see this as evidence that if member disengagement has been an issue, AHIMA needs to own responsibility for that. I’m so thankful for the early, generative conversations with AHIMA President/Chair Mona Calhoun, PhD, MS, Med, RHIA, FAHIMA, and AHIMA President/Chair Elect Maria Caban Alizondo, PhD, RHIT, FAHIMA, which led to this wonderful idea. We answered many questions live and many entered into the chat. We will respond to all questions and post the responses in a gated, member-only section on the website.
Member Needs Assessment: Thank you for your responses. We needed a robust response to this opportunity to guide AHIMA in order to validate directional changes. We are very cautious not to navigate AHIMA toward the position(s) of a very small, but vocal, minority. We received a response rate of nearly 12 percent, which exceeded our goal of 10 percent. This representative viewpoint will be more than enough to use as our compass in service to our members and exceeds the former survey response of 8 percent. Fasten your seat belts. We asked so that we can adjust our approach to approximate what you want and expect. We will not ask you a question and ignore your response.
New Association Management System: AHIMA has had a long-term plan to upgrade its association management system from an antiquated system which has limited our ability to serve you in the way(s) that you deserve. To my surprise, this project had been underway for two and a half years. It was time to cut our losses or commit to the cutover. As you can imagine, this was quite a financial investment after this amount of time. Thus, the decision was made to push on, but to reach an understanding with our vendor that this project needed execution on a defined timeline and a commitment to getting the job done. Over the past two months, we've intensified our efforts to complete the project and plan a go-live cutover that minimizes the risk of service disruptions. We are so glad and proud to bring you this new system this month.
I’m glad to report that the most challenging times for the transition are behind us. However, we certainly have experienced some service disruption that could not be avoided. For that we, and I, apologize. No matter how well you plan your cutover, large scale IT conversions always result in a few bumps along the way. Despite our testing for two months, the live experience could not be fully duplicated in a test environment. I’m proud of our teams for working so hard to execute this plan to ultimately take us to a better place in service of our members. We are all very thankful for your patience and understanding.
You spoke, and we are listening. Please continue to be patient with us; our hearing (listening) is getting better every day.
Sincerely,
Kevin
Kevin Klauer, DO, EJD, FACEP, FACOEP, is the chief executive officer of AHIMA.