President's Podcast: State and Regional ID Societies

Steven Schmitt: [00:00:12] Hello, I'm Steve Schmitt, president of IDSA. And welcome to Let's Talk ID, the podcast that's all ID all the time. Today we are going to spend some time talking about something I think doesn't get enough attention. And that is state and regional infectious disease societies. And I'm joined by three colleagues who know a lot about this topic. Joining me are Dr. Brad Cutrell, associate professor of medicine in ID and ID fellowship program director at UT Southwestern in Dallas. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Cutrell [00:00:46] Glad to be here.

Steven Schmitt: [00:00:48] And I also have Dr. Anu Malani, medical director of health care epidemiology, special pathogens and the antimicrobial stewardship programs at Trinity Health in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Welcome, Anu.

Anu Malani: [00:01:01] Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steven Schmitt: [00:01:02] And last but certainly not least, Dr. Dan McQuillan, who is past president of IDSA and a practicing ID physician at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. Welcome, Dan.

Daniel McQuillen: [00:01:18] Thanks, Steve. Good to see you.

Steven Schmitt: [00:01:19] Let's get to it. All of you have been involved in your state societies. I thought we'd lead off by asking you to tell us about that involvement and how you got started. How about you, Anu? You want to take the lead on this?

Anu Malani: [00:01:35] Sure, absolutely. So our state society is called the Michigan Infectious Diseases Society. I've actually been a member since I was a fellow. I trained at University of Michigan during fellowship. Our society has been around since 1985, but the fellows were actually and continue to be involved. We would actually have a fellows meeting where we would present cases, and we had the opportunity to present posters, which current fellows still have a chance to present posters at our spring meeting. So I've actually been a member since I was a fellow going to date myself, but I finished a fellowship back in '06. And then I've been actually on the board since 2016. I initially was a councilor for three years, and then I was a secretary treasurer for three years, president elect, and I'm currently the president through 2025.

Steven Schmitt: [00:02:23] That's great. It sounds as if the society has had an active program with fellows. And I think that's that's a key component. And Brad, how about you? How about Texas?

Brad Cutrell: [00:02:35] Very similar to Dr. Malani. I first got involved with our society, the Texas ID society, in 2012 when I went down as a senior fellow, similar at our annual meeting that we have every summer, we have cases and poster abstract presentations that where we get at least one fellow from every single ID fellowship across the state of Texas, which is a fair number of ID fellowships. And so it was really my first exposure to meet many of the ID leaders from across the state and to get involved with the society. So I joined during fellowship and then afterwards continued to attend the annual meeting and had opportunity to get more involved, first as a part of the program planning committee for that annual meeting. And then I served actually as the Texas ID society president in 2020 and 2021. We have two year terms. And so it happened to be right in the middle as Covid was hitting. And so we were able to to plan some virtual education for ID practitioners in the state around Covid and have continued to be involved now serving as the treasurer.

Steven Schmitt: [00:03:39] That's fantastic. And you have a great society. I've visited a couple of times down there. And Dan, how about you in Massachusetts?

Daniel McQuillen: [00:03:48] Much like Anu, I joined the Mass ID Society when I was a fellow, but I'm dated even more than he is. I think that was 88, 1988, thereabouts. It was started by some of the same people that started IDSA at about the same time. When I was a fellow, there'd be two meetings a year at the Harvard Club, and it was sort of a big dinner with famous people speaking and things like that. And over the years it's morphed out of there to different venues, and we've tried to make sure that we encompass the entire state of Massachusetts. The meetings are social and networking, but also we'll bring in a speaker who's topical typically to do that. And we don't actually currently have fellows present research, but they do get selected for awards in both clinical excellence and research excellence every year by their programs. I've been on the board and president of that leading into when I was on the board and then president at IDSA. It's an invaluable thing that brings people in the area together that are working in IDD. I think we could leverage both the mass IDD society and other societies more than we currently do. Having been in both seats, there's really great advantages in both directions that we're not taking as much advantage of as we could. Some of that is time and support and all that sort of thing, but it's really kind of invaluable to get the people locally together, and they all have a lot of potential to do a lot more than we do than just networking.

Steven Schmitt: [00:05:28] You know, that's really true, Dan, and it's worth it then to think a little bit about what actually makes the state society effective. You've all been in the president role. And so what are the parts of it that that really make it tick. So, Brad, maybe you could lead off for us. Yeah.

Brad Cutrell: [00:05:46] I'll start out. There's a couple of ingredients we've found over the tenure of our state society when we've been the most effective. Number one, having broad involvement. And I would define broad involvement across multiple domains. So Texas is one of the largest states both by population and geography. And so we try to be very intentional to have stakeholders and whether it's through speakers or attendees from all different aspects and parts of the state. So in Texas, we have 14 medical schools. And so we're very intentional when we're putting together our program and speakers, we try to get speakers from different parts of the state, from different academic institutions and even private practice, so that there's really broad representation of all the different aspects of ID across the state. The second aspect of broad involvement, again, and I kind of already alluded to this having outreach both to the academic and the teaching institutions, but also the private practice ID groups within the state. It's important that those two get to interact with each other, bring their unique perspectives and challenges to the table in discussions, and it really makes it much richer. The second thing I would say, setting aside enough time at the meeting, not having it be so packed with content, but having that social and that networking, that's where a lot of connections are made.

Brad Cutrell: [00:07:05] We often try to encourage our senior fellows to attend. They may find out about job opportunities, or private practice. Groups may come and find a ripe opportunity to recruit people to their practice. That's very essential. And then third, I would say state societies have a unique opportunity. Idsa has to think about what's going on all across the country. But state societies can focus on some of the unique needs or challenges or opportunities within a state. And so we've found it's been oftentimes great to engage. For example, we had the state public health commissioner come and speak specifically about what's going on in the state of Texas related to different epidemics and outbreaks. We had one of the early cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the state. And so we were able to give an update really specific to our state as a part of our annual meeting. So I would say broad involvement, ample time for social and networking, and really engaging with public health and other groups to address unique challenges within your state. Yeah.

Steven Schmitt: [00:08:06] So the cross pollination, I agree with that. That's a that's a pretty important thing. And we've tried to make that happen. And I love the idea of creating time for community. You know you are a focused community there. You alluded to something that I think is really important, which is the notion of interacting with public health in the state. And that is something that we found in Ohio to be an important component. How about you, Anu? What have you found in Michigan?

Anu Malani: [00:08:35] It's funny how we have common themes. Probably important to recognize that the state societies are basically a microcosm of of IDSA. So pertinent issues that come across IDSA also come across the state. So just to give a little bit of idea of our state society, you know, we have about a little bit over 200 members, about 180 are active members. We have some emeritus members, and we have about 20 fellows, similar to both Brad and Dan. We have two meetings we have and they both are in person meetings. Part of the question always for state societies and actually even IDSA is, you know, what what value do you offer your members? Why do people want to come to your meetings? One is as Brad described, his broad involvement, broad representation in a time for connectivity, our in-person meetings, you know, they both a little bit halted when we had the pandemic. But typically, you know, two in-person meetings, our spring meeting, we have the night before the meeting, all the fellows present cases similar to kind of what was described. And the next day, we usually have research from the various institutions and a keynote speaker, and we all sort of get together. But interestingly, in the fall meeting, our meeting is combined with the state health department. So it's a Mids and MD HHS meeting because of that, echoed by the points that were already described why they really hit on hot areas in our state.

Anu Malani: [00:09:58] We have some keynote speakers as well. But and our topic actually of choice is going to be highly pathogenic avian influenza. Because like Texas, we soon follow Texas by having the next second and third case. But same thing. You know, we try to hit other relevant issues. You know, we've covered like in the fall, we covered a, you know, a large blastomycosis outbreak, you know, tick borne diseases. I think there's value in all those things. And I think people want to come and it's sort of the connectivity. But you know, how how does sort of the the state society continue to flourish. And I think it's having engaged board members, engaged members, but also ability for mentorship. And when I first joined or as a part of Mids, the membership has sort of turned over. And now all of a sudden I'm kind of in a in an older role as opposed to being sort of, you know, someone who is younger, but the ability to sort of offer mentorship. And one of the things that we just did as a, as a society, as we added a Mids fellow liaison position, this is a non-voting position to our board.

Anu Malani: [00:11:03] And we just actually went through with this in July. So like fresh hot off the press. The great thing is, is we actually had a number of fellow applicants that wanted to join. And so we as a board decided to have a sort of position. And one of the reasons for this is for us to make sure that our content and our offerings are meeting the needs of our, our sort of younger trainees and making sure that we're also offering something to them, to that they think is important. But as we sort of go on and we think about how does the society sort of stay valuable to try to keep some of these young people engaged and so that they one day will participate. The other thing that probably both Brad and Dan can talk about is it's really helpful to have an administrative sort of dyad partner and administrative director. Probably the bigger state societies are fortunate to maybe be able to have some funds to do that, but that really does make operationally communications, handling a website, handling dues. I mean, that's really difficult if you don't have some administrative help. So I think having a engaged executive director can also be quite helpful.

Steven Schmitt: [00:12:09] That's a point that we've heard from other successful societies. Dan, what's what's the administrative help been at Massachusetts for years?

Daniel McQuillen: [00:12:18] It would be an administrator who worked with or for whoever the president was as sort of a bootstrap side job. In fact, actually, I think I was the administrator for the first two years I was the president. So I am keenly aware of how essential that job is. But yeah, it's it's you can't get anything done unless you have somebody that knows how to do that kind of stuff. For a our society is not all that huge. And we kind of subsist meeting the meeting on dues, and we don't really take in much more than what we spend on our meetings. So it's really hard to to kind of eke out an existence that way. But if you don't have somebody that can do that, then you spend all your time worrying about that and not doing the things that are fun about this, which is the networking is is essential, especially for the trainees. And we try to encourage the training programs to send as many of their fellows, because we just do a one evening every six months type thing. So it's not like we're taking them off service or any of that. And you're right, networking for them both to get them into the process and invested in being involved in the future and also to to mentor them is really important.

Steven Schmitt: [00:13:34] Yeah, that's really true. So the mentorship is a is a key theme here, isn't it? One other question that has been alluded to here, and maybe is worth attacking directly, is why should IDSA members join their state society and put the money to it? The time to it be active? Why should they? Ana, do you have any thoughts about that?

Anu Malani: [00:13:57] I think it's a relatively like our state society, and I don't want to speak for Brad and Dan, but but it sure sounds similar from their experiences. I mean, it's a pretty low risk decision. Easy organization to be a part of. Our dues are 50 bucks a year. Actually, they're I think they're 45. Most state societies and our state society is actually really we're quite welcoming. We want to work with fellows. We want to get to know the fellows. You know, what was described earlier was both connectivity, uh, networking, mentorship. I think that those are all possibilities. And, you know, it doesn't take really a significant amount of effort and time. You know, we have two large in-person meetings. We have an in-person get together at IDSA. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing well over half of the fellows that train in Michigan stay in Michigan. I'm an example of that. For those that are thinking about sort of opportunities to stay in the area, a chance to sort of meet your colleagues, your employers. You know, many of us do collaborative work, collaborative research. Many of us are part of health systems as well, and it's a chance for us to see our colleagues from our different health systems.

Anu Malani: [00:15:02] I also think, you know that the piece about public health and getting to know your public health partners, that doesn't always happen. That's not always easy to do. But at an in-person meeting and you put a face to a name that actually can be very, very helpful down the road. And that's actually helpful for from public health standpoint. They find that quite helpful as well. The question still is, is, you know, what is the value that you offer to your members. Heard a lot about value, but I think if you can do relevant educational offerings, you know, at some sort of regular frequency, I think that can be helpful. And then finally, and I think we'll maybe get to this, the state society can hopefully also be used as a common organization for relevant ID messaging, both across the state, but maybe not even just across the state, and talking about advocacy and things like that, which I think IDSA could be very helpful for.

Steven Schmitt: [00:15:54] Brad, what about you? Do you think there are great reasons for folks in Texas to join the Texas ID society?

Brad Cutrell: [00:16:00] Absolutely. These are your people. I mean, these are the ID clinicians in your state who are in the trenches with you experiencing the same challenges that you're facing. Also, the ones that get super excited about the cool cases that you're seeing. It's almost in some ways, just like the state societies are a microcosm of IDSA. Oftentimes these regional or state meetings are a microcosm of ID week. And so maybe you don't have funds to go to ID week every single year, or your schedule conflicts, but you have an opportunity to show up and really hear from amazing experts in the field, but interact with them on a small scale where you can be one on one. I mean, in Texas, we've had updates in the last several years from Clinton White on Neurocysticercosis, Tom Patterson on fungal disease, César Arias on Enterococcus. You're just right there, one on one with these people, asking them questions, making connections so that when you may encounter a difficult case, you know how contacts. And I'm sure it's similar across all the state societies. Basically all of this accumulated ID wisdom and just practical. Some problem that you may be dealing with in your fellowship or in your practice, there probably are people who are facing some of those same challenges that you can talk to and come up with creative solutions and ideas. There's tremendous opportunity for advocacy within the state, with state officials on issues that are really relevant, you know, to ID practitioners. And so if you come together as a state society, you speak louder than just individuals speaking on behalf of themselves.

Steven Schmitt: [00:17:41] Yeah, I think that's really true, especially as state public health people right there. Right. That's a critical, critical component. How about you, Jan? What what reasons do you give to join the mass ID society.

Daniel McQuillen: [00:17:55] As you're hearing? A lot of these things are very common. But it also, I think, has to do with who we are in the field that we're in. We actually have the former state public health infectious disease physician come to all of our meetings and give a report every single one. He'd been on the board when I was a fellow and should have been president, but took the job that he had at the state and thought it would be a conflict of interest for some unknown reason. So we got him back on the board and then conscripted him to be president because he didn't say no. You know, there's a couple of things that hold us back to being more involved in our communities. One is, is the administrative support, but the other is not necessarily financial support, but support in how to go about addressing things that the staff at IDSA, although they don't have unlimited time to do this, they can provide guidance in how that happens and make sure that we have some assistance in how to voice things and not put our foot in it at the same time. But also we have the possibility of taking the message that the national society is putting out and localizing it, which I think is really, really in the United States right now. It's essential.

Steven Schmitt: [00:19:12] Agree completely. Dan, one of the things that really helped us go in Ohio too, was to actually we made the treasurer job longer. We made the treasurer secretary treasurer job a five year job because it made a difference that somebody was managing the finances in a consistent way. I wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about the IDSA state and regional society affiliate program. And and so, you know, just to bring people up to speed, there's this affiliate program where you, the state society can fill out a questionnaire and there is a if you want to do it, there's a contract. It's pretty straightforward. It describes how the national society and the state society interacts, and that there are certain benefits to that that are actually codified in there, including a catalog of resources, calendar directory, and so forth. You know, I'm wondering how that's gone. So several societies have joined, and we have a couple of them right here. So I, I thought I'd ask Brad to share what how how has that affiliation gone. What have what is your state society and its members gained from the affiliation program?

Brad Cutrell: [00:20:30] When I first got involved with our society, I would say the relationship between IDSA and the state societies were a bit more passive. You know, this was probably back in the early 20 tens. And then right before Covid, there was this shift in a real intentionality about engaging with state societies, reinvigorating them, learning from state societies that were really active and robust and maybe trying to revitalize some in states that maybe had fallen a bit on hard times. Covid then hit and everybody was quite busy. But I'm excited to see that IDSA has continued to really formalize and bring a lot of intentionality to this affiliation. And so Texas, our state society, signed up, and I think some of the benefits that we've developed or that we've experienced from this affiliation, Number one is just, again, IDSA has a significant more number of resources than any state society is likely going to have. And so the ability to develop content and resources for your members on important topics, whether they be advocacy, whether things around kind of financial billing and coding, important emerging public health threats, IDSA is going to be a tremendous ability to develop content and resources to share with you. Secondly, help and assistance in kind of getting some things set up and helping manage things around marketing with your website and stuff like that. Idsa has some teams that can help support that. Number three, and this has been a tremendous benefit, is IDSA has always been very generous about taking one of their board members or a senior leader within IDSA and sending them to one of your annual meetings to to give a talk, both on their topic of expertise as well as just an update for your membership about what's going on at IDSA.

Brad Cutrell: [00:22:19] And that's always been fantastic, IDSA pace to send that person to you. So it's a great opportunity. If you're on a slim budget, you can get really a nationally recognized speaker like Doctor Schmidt or somebody like that to come and speak to your society. And then the last thing and what we did this past year, which I think was tremendously impactful, was we actually had multiple members from IDSA, including Doctor Schmidt, Chris Buskey, as well as one of their consultants who came and went through a lot of the work that's been going on related to the negotiation playbook, some of the the work that's been done to try to help improve financial compensation and really getting into the nuts and bolts of how people can thrive as ID clinicians, whether in academics or in private practice. And some of the better ways. We all need coaching, I think, to advocate for ourselves better. And so I think it was tremendously practical and really, truly a value add to to the people who attended the meeting. So those are just some of the benefits I would highlight related to our affiliation with IDSA.

Steven Schmitt: [00:23:21] Well thanks Brad. That's really nice to hear that, that there was some value in Texas. And how about in Michigan?

Anu Malani: [00:23:28] Well, Steve, you actually came to our November meeting. We had to bring you up north.

Steven Schmitt: [00:23:33] Yeah. Same deal.

Anu Malani: [00:23:34] Yeah. You know, I was just thinking about what Brad was saying, and that's exactly what we did. We tied your visit. Dana Rollins came in town and we had some IG consultants that came in town. And, you know, we we advertise this like we said, hey, you know, we're going to have our fall meeting, our combined Mids and MDS meeting. And then in the evening session, what we're going to do is we're going to have a nice dinner and we want all the fellows to come. We want faculty, whoever is able to come, come and let's talk about the work that has been done around negotiation, compensation. How can we sort of improve things? You did actually a quick state of the state of what's going on with IDSA. And then and you guys were, you know, nice enough to sort of take questions. And I actually thought it was great. It was really nice. And and that happens I think because well, one there's there's the affiliation program and obviously, you know, we signed that contract as well. But there's sort of kind of, hey, please come and share your expertise and then also meet with our membership and understand, you know, what what our ID physicians in Michigan feeling. You know, what are trainees feeling again, probably a microcosm of what is happening. But I think that that was a quite value added. And as you guys went around and gave other talks like that, I think with each one, with each iteration, probably those improving get better.

Anu Malani: [00:24:55] Thinking about what has sort of been the benefit. I think it was at this ID week where we had sort of all the state programs get together. I can't remember now where there was in 2023 or 2022. But but, you know, it was actually really interesting to hear about other state societies and where they were. And and I sure appreciate all this dialogue. But many of the state societies are not as fortunate as us on this sort of podcast where, you know, they either didn't have enough people or didn't have any sort of organizational structure to sort of move things forward. But it was really, I think, the chance to sort of connect with people in that sort of fashion, which is not been typically done, was was also helpful to hear about. I one of the things we heard about is I think it was one of the state societies in California, I believe, where they were, you know, their membership was quite broad. And what we've seen actually, even with our state society, is historically, we've always been physician based. But in the last five years, you know, 10% of our membership is Non-physicians. We have pharmacists, we have infection Preventionists, we have APS, advanced practice professionals in IDD. And that membership has become a bit more broad.

Steven Schmitt: [00:26:04] That's an interesting comment about the membership. And, you know, we really are about the team in ID these days. So your members are now reflecting that. And I think that's terrific. So Dan, you know IDSA gets something from this too right? I wonder if you could comment on what IDSA gets from the affiliation.

Daniel McQuillen: [00:26:26] It's all the things we've been talking about here. And I was just sort of thinking back as Ana was describing the meeting at ID week, you know, back when I was sort of going up through the Clinical Affairs Committee and getting close to being on the board, and there used to be a state and regional societies breakfast every year at Idweek, where the president of IDSA would, would tread with trepidation to go in and find out what was going to be asked of them. Um, and it's really a lot more adult arrangement now than I think it used to be, and more kind of bidirectional. Uh, there were some great characters in those, in those things. But from an IDSA perspective, there's a lot of things that you and I and others have been trying to do for years to advance recognition of the work that we do, and many times having a lot of really great output that seemingly fell on deaf ears. I think we realized with time that in order to get anywhere with any of this, you really have to socialize it across the entire membership. And there are people that aren't going to come to one meeting every year to do that.

Daniel McQuillen: [00:27:35] And this is a way of both hearing what is important on the local level, but also transmitting back things that I think can, for lack of a better allusion, lift all the boats across the United States. There's no question that there are differing statuses of the different state and regional societies, and I think there's a lot of work that we could do to resurrect some of the ones that have fallen by the wayside, some of the things that we've been able to accomplish through our IDSA advocacy program would never have happened without local involvement. There's no way you get people to pay attention to you on Capitol Hill when you bring me in to see, you know, the senator from Washington state, they respond to their constituents. It's it's just basic, you know, shoe leather politics. And and in order for us to advance causes that mean a lot to us, that's the kind of thing we need to do. And so getting state and regional societies involved in that process can only benefit both.

Steven Schmitt: [00:28:38] That advocacy piece is huge, and one of the things that we found over the years is types of legislation are bubbling up from the states. That's how we on the national level often find out. What's coming is to hear it from the States. Somebody from the state comes in and shoots us an email and says, you know, we've got this piece of legislation that affects ID docs or affects our patients. You know, what can IDSA do to help us address this? And and then also just alerts IDSA to how these things are moving across the country. That's really a critical piece. And then the other thing I'd like to comment on that. I think IDSA gets in the bargain, at least I can recall back in the days of the state and regional Assembly, was we would get leaders from the state societies. You know, we got wind of people who were engaged, and we tapped them and started finding stuff for them to do, and I think that still happens. So I do think that's an important piece for IDSA. As a last word here, I wanted to give you all a chance to tell IDSA how we can improve the affiliation. So I'll ask each of you if there is an item or two to add to the wish list that IDSA Idstr can put to the affiliate program that would add value for your state's members. Brad, do you want to start with that.

Brad Cutrell: [00:30:13] In general, just, you know, continuing to build on intentional, collaborative approach of working with the state societies and being open to that bidirectional listening as well as sharing things. I divide the state societies kind of into two broad categories. There's some that, you know, I think are pretty active. And so what IDSA can do for groups like that is continue to do the things that, you know, the state society is not going to have the scale to be able to do so. Content creation, helping with some some support for for website continuing to, you know, send us your great speakers to support our meetings and really highlighting some of the advocacy things on the national scale and trickling those things down and kind of using the state societies as conduits and messengers to to get that out to the broader ID community. The second group is the state societies, where maybe it's fallen on hard times, or maybe it's it's ceased to exist. And to if you live in a state that's like that, I would say, don't give up hope. There's a chance, I think, and there's a desire to help you reinvigorate that. I don't want to speak for the other group, but I think everybody on this call shoot us an email. We would love to help you brainstorm and dream up how you could kind of resurrect one of those things. And so I think IDSA could really be strategic. And for some of those states to, you know, again, providing them easy roadmaps for here's some kind of simple governance structure. Here's some ways that you could kind of start to have some easy wins. Again, to show value within the state about why it's worth investing and restarting those state societies. So so those are a couple of things I'd highlight.

Steven Schmitt: [00:31:51] And I'll comment, Brad, that there are some of these governance resources already available on the state and regional affiliate program website. So Anu, what about you? Any wishes?

Anu Malani: [00:32:02] Advocacy is really important. Clearly you know the state society. And I think we're actually a relatively a pretty high functioning state society. We we have some resources, but we definitely don't have any advocacy resources. We don't have anyone on the Hill watching out for things that are specific to Michigan or things that are bubbling up. Occasionally something may come up and someone may say, hey, look at this, what do you think? And we may have to, you know, comment on that as a, as a society. But having been involved in Idsa's advocacy efforts, coming to the Hill and seeing what that's like and meeting with our local leaders on the Hill, I mean, wow, I think members need to know what what's happening. We need sort of simple messages, not just in in the sort of the daily IDSA blog buried in the breadth of, you know, we're all sort of saturated with emails, but if you could actually give me something 3 or 4 bullet points quarterly and something that you know IDSA is doing and something that you know is important to the state, I would love to share that with, with membership, actually, it's bi directionally important because what is the value of the state society provides. And then secondly, what is IDSA doing for its members. It serves a couple couple dual purposes.

Anu Malani: [00:33:13] The other thing is thinking about recruitment. You know, at these meetings they're not just ID doctors, but we also have residents coming. We also have medical students coming. And they also are potentially presenting research. Look, you know, we're not rejecting any abstracts unless it's, you know, totally crazy. But but I mean, that's like almost never. Right. It's 100% acceptance. Come and present your stuff. And we want medical students and residents to come. Well, hey, maybe there's a way to sort of circulate. Best trainee abstract state society meeting gets a, you know, free registration dip ID week or something. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but recruitment is going to it's going to start locally and it's going to happen at the local and state level. And so how do we sort of foster networking with Idstr on that, which obviously recruitment is vitally important to sort of all of us in those strategic priorities. So, so sort of thinking about those. And then lastly, just sort of open lines of communication. I really appreciate the fact that we're doing this podcast is wonderful. I think we've come a long way. I think, you know, has been highlighted where we were, you know, pre-pandemic and where we are now. It seems like, you know, a lot of this is moving in the right direction.

Steven Schmitt: [00:34:25] Dan, you've had a lot of experience with State and regionals. Last word.

Daniel McQuillen: [00:34:28] We had a really interested third year medical student who spent a month with us last month, and it happened to coincide with our spring mass ID society meeting. And so we made her go. She was really reticent to go, but she had a phenomenal time. Those are opportunities that we could probably foster at the local level, even better than we do now. And the collaboration with IDSA as well and how to do that is helpful. And, you know, having been on both ends of receiving and giving presentations about the physician compensation initiative and that sort of thing, that outreach is invaluable as well on every level. Incorporating that into the relationship is essential.

Steven Schmitt: [00:35:13] All right. Well, thank you all so much Brad and Dan, for sharing your experience and your suggestions, your perspectives with us. And I really want to encourage all IDSA members listening to our podcast to check out your state and regional societies. Join up, be active for the many benefits they.

Speaker5: [00:35:37] Provide.

Steven Schmitt: [00:35:38] And watch this space for more episodes of Let's Talk ID. Thank you very much.