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ASA NEWSLETTER
 
 
December 1998
Volume 62
Number 12
 
ASA NEWS

Phoenix Regional Refresher Course

"Anesthesia Report Cards" and "What Are the Costs of Delivering Surgery and Anesthesia Care?" are two of the 20 lectures offered at the Regional Refresher Course to be held in Phoenix, Arizona. The program will be held on Saturday and Sunday, January 23-24, 1999, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix.

All lectures will relate to cardiovascular disease and outcome and economics. Lee A. Fleisher, M.D., is the program chair. He will speak on "Preoperative Evaluation of the Patient With Vascular Disease" and "Risk of Anesthesia: How Far Have We Come and Where Are We Going?" The other faculty and their topics are:

  • Jeffrey S. Balser, M.D., Ph.D., "Perioperative Dysrhythmia" and "Anesthetic Management of the Patient With a Pacemaker";

  • Paul G. Barash, M.D., "Anesthesia Report Cards" and "Anesthetic Management of the Patient With Valvular Heart Disease";

  • Michelle Y. Braunfeld, M.D., "Anesthesia for Liver Transplantation";

  • Michael K. Cahalan, M.D., "Physiologic Approach to the Patient With Congenital Heart Disease" and "Current Applications and Cost-Effectiveness of Transesophageal Echocardiography";

  • James A. DiNardo, M.D., "Update on Ventricular Assist Devices as a Bridge to Cardiac Transplantation";

  • Alex Macario, M.D., "What Are the Costs of Delivering Surgery and Anesthesia Care?" and "How Can Anesthesiologists Improve the Value of Anesthesia Service?";

  • Dennis T. Mangano, M.D., Ph.D., "Perioperative Myocardial Ischemia and Infarction" and "Anti-ischemic Therapy in the Perioperative Period";

  • Charles W. Otto, M.D., "Current Concepts in CPR";

  • Michael F. Roizen, M.D., "Anesthesia for Abdominal Aortic Surgery" and "How Old Are You Really?";

  • Joyce A. Wahr, M.D., "Recent Advances in Blood Substitutes" and "Hematologic Problems During the Perioperative Period."

A faculty discussion of cardiac case presentations will end Saturday's program.

ASA is approved by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to sponsor continuing medical education programs for physicians.

ASA designates this continuing medical education program for 14 credit hours in category 1 of the Physician's Recognition Award of the American Medical Association. A staggered lecture schedule allows attendees to earn more credit hours than under the former schedule.

Registration is suggested by December 20, 1998. Registration fees are $250 for ASA active members, $125 for resident members and $600 for nonmembers. The course lecture book is an additional $25. Meeting registrants will be able to download the abstracts from ASA's Web site two weeks before the meeting at no charge.

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix. A room reservation form will be sent upon registration for the meeting. The form should be returned directly to the hotel by January 2, 1999.

The hotel is located at 122 North Second Street in downtown Phoenix.



1999 Membership Dues

Membership dues for 1999 will be as follows:

Active $350.00
Affiliate $175.00
Resident $ 25.00
Medical Student $10.00


The 1999 dues represent no increase since 1991.

This information is being provided for those who wish to pay their membership fees in December. The dues statement reflecting the above will be mailed to the ASA membership in January. Dues payments should be deductible by members as ordinary and necessary business expenses. The 1993 federal tax law, however, eliminated the deductibility of lobbying expenses; in the case of membership dues paid to a section 501(c)(6) organization such as ASA, this means the "business expense" deduction will be denied to the extent membership dues are spent by the organization on lobbying.

At the time of distributing dues notices for the coming year, ASA is required (in order to avoid paying a special tax) to provide members with an estimate of what the non-deductible lobbying percentage will be for that year. ASA estimates that the percentage of 1999 membership dues to be used for lobbying will be 18 percent, and this advice will be included in the 1999 dues notice. You should thus deduct only 82 percent of the respective dues amounts shown above as a business expense; e.g., in the case of an active member, $287 will be deductible. The IRS has advised that this is true whether you pay your 1999 dues before or after January 1.



1999 PBLD Program - Open Call for Cases

Meg A. Rosenblatt, M.D.
Committee on Problem-Based Learning Discussions

More than 1,000 attendees participated in one or several of the 110 Problem-Based Learning Discussions (PBLD) that were held throughout the five days of the ASA Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. In an effort to maintain the vitality and relevance of the PBLD Program, the ASA PBLD Committee announced that there will again be an open selection process to choose several of the 1999 PBLD cases.

Any member of ASA is invited to submit a PBLD case to the committee for review and possible selection for the 1999 ASA Annual Meeting. We are looking for controversial topics, compelling true cases and areas where there are content gaps in the current program, including transplant anesthesia, trauma anesthesia, critical care medicine, medical-legal issues and education in anesthesiology.

All submissions must conform to the guidelines for PBLD cases, as described in the 1998 PBLD Case Book. These include title, objectives, case, model case discussion and references. Cases will be evaluated for relevance, enigma, content, conformity to guidelines and clarity of presentation.

Please send cases to Meg A. Rosenblatt, M.D., Mount Sinai Medical Center, Box 1010, Department of Anesthesiology, 1 Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, New York 10029-6574. Please include a telephone number or e-mail address so that the receipt can be confirmed. Deadline for submission of PBLD cases is
January 31, 1999.



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