Dear AAOM colleagues,
I want to thank the search committee and the transition group for the countless efforts to go through the search process. The search committee was led by immediate-past president, Dr. Vidya Sankar as the chair with Drs. Craig Hatch, Bob Eskow and myself as members. The transition group was also led by Dr. Sankar with the search committee members plus Drs. Jaisri Thoppay, Sunday Akintoye, and Lauren Patton. This transition group met weekly for the past 6 months which helped us tremendously to have relatively smooth transition. I also want to thank Ms. Beth Chitnis, Senior Vice President of Etherio and interim executive director (ED) of AAOM until Etherio identified the new ED, Ms. Chitnis was extremely instrumental for the transition and as the interim ED. Ms. Chitnis also led the search process of the new ED and kindly involved us for the interview process, and we identified Ms. Holly Roseski as the new ED who started for the role from the 2nd week of October. Entire executive committee (EC) members are very excited to work with Ms. Roseski for the coming years! I hope many of you will have a chance to meet with Ms. Chitnis and Roseski in Las Vegas during AAOM/EAOM (European Association of Oral Medicine) joint conference. As I stated at the annual conference, one of my goals this year is to increase and enhance collaborations with other organizations as well as our current and new potential sponsors. I am happy to report that we have made great stride with this goal. As co-chairs of the sponsorship committee, Drs. Arwa Farag, Thoppay and myself are actively engaging in conversation with other organizations and current and new potential sponsors. We initiated discussions with American Academy of Orofacial Pain (AAOP), Special Care Dentistry Association (SCDA) and American Academy of Hospital Dentists (AAHD) this year. We had an agreement of reciprocal booth exchange with SCDA for this year. I planned to represent AAOM at SCDA 2024 conference in September 2024, but this was canceled and postponed to April 2025 due to hurricane Helene. I attended the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC) meeting in June to represent the AAOM which we started a reciprocal booth exchange with them 2 years ago. We are discussing additional possible other mechanisms to collaborate with these organizations. We are also planning to continue the collaboration with American Dental Hygienists’ Association (ADHA). With a tremendous help from Drs. JoAnn Gurenlian and Nancy Burkhart, two esteemed affiliate fellows of AAOM, the sponsorship committee initiated the collaboration in 2023 to deliver joint webinar which Dr. Nathaniel Treister, president of AAOM at that time, gave a presentation. Dr. Sankar, also as president of AAOM, gave a presentation in March 2024. We are in the planning phase of repeating this collaboration to deliver in April 2025. We are also planning webinars with our 2024 annual platinum sponsors, K Pharmaceuticals and Proteocyte AI, in December 2024 and January 2025. More information will come shortly. In October, Dr. Thoppay and I attended ADA SmileCon in New Orleans. We had an excellent meeting with ADA president Dr. Linda Edgar, ADA president-elect Dr. Brett Kessler, ADA executive director Dr. Raymond Cohlmia, and ADA senior vice president of affiliate services Ms. Michele Reeder whom you may remember as long time ED of AAOM until 2020. We discussed various potential collaborations between the ADA and AAOM. Since Dr. Kessler’s vision (he became ADA president shortly after our meeting) includes integrating medicine and dentistry, we proposed a number of collaborative initiatives. We are planning for Drs. Kessler and Cohlmia to join to AAOM monthly EC meeting in December 2024 to discuss the collaboration details further. In addition, we discussed ADA support for oral medicine practice management. In September 2024, AAOM established a new Practice Management Committee for which I appointed Dr. Thoppay to chair. As a part of the committee’s vision, we aim to develop dental codes related to oral medicine, create medically necessary dental evaluation/procedure codes for medical billing , expand the taxonomy code under allopathic & osteopathic physicians, and participate in various committees and activities with the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the National Uniform Claim Committee (NUCC) as to represent oral health. The ADA has expressed willingness to support these efforts. I am very excited about the current and future contributions of the Practice Management Committee and I am deeply thankful for the invaluable contributions of Dr. Thoppay’s to this committee. Many of you may wonder about the lack of a 2024 AAOM Fall Meeting. For various reasons, including the transition of management, we decided not to have an in-person Fall Meeting this year. Instead, we are planning to have a virtual Fall/Winter Meeting in January 2025. Please keep an eye on emails and social media postings regarding the details of this virtual meeting. I am thrilled to announce that we will be hosting the AAOM/EAOM joint conference in Las Vegas in May 2025. A few years ago, Drs. Nikolaos Nikitakis and Treister initiated the discussion for this joint conference. During the planning phase, we were able to expand participation to include organizations from around the world. This conference will be titled as AAOM/EAOM joint conference with participation of BSOM (Brazilian Society of Oral Medicine), JSOM (Japanese Society of Oral Medicine), OMAA (Oral Medicine Academy of Australasia), SSOM (Saudi Society of Oral Medicine), and WWOM (World Workshop of Oral Medicine). I am hoping that the expansion of this meeting will open the door to a future World Conference of Oral Medicine. I want to thank everyone involved in the meeting planning. The planning group includes Drs. Nikitakis, Marco Meleti, Konstantina Delli, Michele Mignogna, and Maria Georgaki from EAOM, Dr. Sue-Ching Yeoh from OMAA, Dr. Alan Roger Santos-Silva from BSOM, Dr. Kazuhito Satomura from JSOM, Dr. Farag from SSOM, WWOM, and AAOM, Drs. Hatch, Thoppay, Katherine France, David Dean, Jennifer Frustino, Shaiba Sandhu, Tiffany Tavares, Treister, Sankar, and myself from the AAOM, and Ms. Kowana Ragland, Beth Chitnis, and Holly Roseski from Etherio. The scientific sessions committee co-chaired by Drs. Dean, Frustino and Sandhu has been instrumental in coordinating with representatives of other groups to plan robust scientific sessions. As you may know, we issued our official “call for abstracts” early and for an extended period this year. This was done to facilitate your participation to the meeting. I would like to thank the abstracts committee co-chaired by Drs. Tavares, Bindakhil, and Napodano for their dedication to the AAOM and exceptional organizational skills. With the hard work and dedication of so many talented volunteers, I am confident that the AAOM/EAOM joint conference with participation of BSOM, JSOM, OMAA, SSOM, and WWOM in May 2025 in Las Vegas will be an outstanding conference. I can’t wait to see you all in Las Vegas.
Sincerely,
Ken Ikeda AAOM President |