A dream come true: being President of ASHRM.

During our 33rd Annual Conference of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, I had the absolute honor and privilege to thank our 2013 ASHRM board and staff along with the ASHRM membership. On behalf of the membership I extended heartfelt thanks for a job well done to our retiring board members, friends, and colleagues: Faye Shepherd, Ellen Grady-Venditti, Michael Midgley, and Immediate Past President Mary Anne Hilliard. Together, we welcomed 2014 ASHRM board members and witnessed the oath of office to Hala Helm, David Sine, and Sherrill Peters, along with President-Elect Ellen Grady-Venditti and our 2014 President Jacque Mitchell.

Our ASHRM journey continues: ERM for our patients' safety.

First and foremost, as your 2013 ASHRM president, I'd like to thank you for all of the significant accomplishments you've helped ASHRM attain this year. And I'll be forever grateful for your support and making my personal and professional dream come true-to serve as your president. Advocating on behalf of all healthcare risk managers and furthering the quest of Getting to Zero for our patients' safety through Enterprise Risk Management, or ERM, has been an honor, because everyone is a risk manager!

Our patients' safety through our new vision, mission, and strategic plan.

This being my first president's column, I would be remise if I did not provide a heartfelt thanks to the ASHRM membership, who elected me to serve as your 2013 ASHRM President. Thank you all for allowing me to continue to give back to our fine and noble healthcare risk management profession!

Online learning as a staff risk management education option.

As clinicians face growing responsibilities to keep up with continuing medical education offerings, they have less time to learn fundamental risk management knowledge to practice safely. To meet their clinicians' needs and time constraints, the authors developed, implemented and assessed 15 lessons in three online risk management courses for resident physicians in an academic center. This report demonstrates that Internet-based learning can provide a practical alternative to formal classroom teaching of a risk management curriculum to busy resident physicians and potentially to other healthcare professionals.

Characteristics of surgeons with high and low malpractice claims rates.

We studied the relationship of malpractice claims and the personal, educational, and practice characteristics of a sample of surgeons (n = 427). The surgeons were members of a physician-owned malpractice trust and represented all those who had fewer than 0.13 malpractice claims per year and those with more than 0.