Texas Society of Radiologic Technologists, Inc. President

Rodney C. Fisher, PhD, RT(R)(N)(CT)(BD), CNMT

As President for 2022 – 2023, I have had several priorities and personal projects.  One has been to bring as much transparency to TXSRT as possible.  We are posting minutes of Board of Director meetings on a regular basis.  For the first time in many years, we are having a public board meeting on Saturday morning, October 15^th.  The board meeting will be available either in person in Houston, Wichita Falls, or via Zoom for those who wish to attend at home.  Another change TXSRT has made is to adopt a regular dual-entry accounting system.  The Executive Office Manager, Courtney Snyder, and the Secretary-Treasurer, Jenny Otrezov, and I have moved our books over to a Quick Books Online system, effective with the new budget that started on September 1, 2022.  This accounting system will provide us with up-to-the minute data on our bank accounts, our expenses, and how we are doing with our budget.  We will be able to create customized reports about any aspect of the business side of the society.  We will also be able to better track information which will make auditing the books more accurate and effective.

The second priority I have for this year is to improve our “institutional memory”.  By institutional memory, I mean we as an organization need to improve the way we handle our records, organize our tasks, and prevent officer jobs from becoming too overwhelming.

We are moving all of our records online, or “in the cloud”.  Each volunteer will have a section of our cloud storage available organized by their job to store all their information.  This will improve our ability to onboard new officers and volunteers more effectively.  It will also help ensure that we always have the records we need at any time, and are less dependent upon former officers or chairs retaining their records properly, and turning them over to their replacement when the time comes.

We are also streamlining our committee system.  During a review this summer, the board found several committees which were not being used, and committees which had duties redundant in nature.  These committees have been eliminated from our organizational structure.  In addition, we have introduced the role of “coordinator” for those jobs which may only require one or two people rather than an entire committee.  For instance, many of our student contests can be more effectively administered by one or two people reporting to the Vice President rather than an entire committee trying to do several jobs at once.

We are working on making the officer jobs less overwhelming and time consuming and more attractive so members will want to be officers rather than accepting a job solely from a sense of duty.  Many of the day-to-day operations of the organization have been placed on the shoulders of the elected officers.  With the streamlining I discussed above, we are delegating many of the day-to-day duties of the officers to other volunteers, with the goal of breaking one large job into several smaller tasks.  This will give our volunteers meaningful roles which they can do over several years, becoming experts in their positions.  This is a much more effective model than having these tasks done by officers who will only hold the office a single year.  Under our old system, by the time an officer became proficient at all the jobs they were supposed to do, it was time to move on to a new office.  The new officer then had to effectively start over.  Year after year we have been “reinventing the wheel”.  Now, many of these jobs will be done by other volunteers who will perform these tasks over several years.  This will add more experience and continuity to our organization, and leave the officers to their primary jobs of strategic planning and supporting our volunteers.  This will also help us grow our volunteer base into a larger pool from which to draw future officers.

My last priority for this year is to grow our membership base.  Our clout in Austin and our ability to successfully advocate for our profession is directly proportional to how many members we have.  If we are few in numbers, there is little reason for legislators to pay any attention to our concerns.  Larger lobbying organizations will always have the upper hand in promoting their agenda, which can often be in conflict with ours.  Our agenda is, and always will be to promote patient safety and improve the diagnostic quality of medical imaging by ensuring that only qualified technologists perform any phase of medical imaging.  We also strongly believe that only qualified providers should have the authority to order medical imaging and interpret the results.  It is this partnership between us as technologists, and the providers to whom we send our images and tests results which will ensure our profession is recognized for what it is: one of the most important professions in first-line medical care.  It is only by being strong in numbers we can achieve the respect our professionalism deserves every day as essential healthcare workers.  As such, TXSRT will always work to be a great value to its members, but we need your help.  We need you to volunteer to help us grow our profession and advocate for our professional status.  You can go here to see the opportunities and to sign-up: 2022 – 2023 Volunteer Opportunities.  We also need you to talk to your co-workers about why it is important to be part of the state society, and how easy it is to make a difference simply by joining.

Thank you all for everything you do every day!  You all really make a difference!  I hope to see many of you at the Annual Meeting April 20 – 22, 2023 in Wichita Falls, TX.

Rodney C. Fisher, PhD, RT(R)(N)(CT)(BD), CNMT

President 2022 – 2023