Risk to reality...

Today, I did something that astonished me.

I signed a licensing agreement that will help PHA bring medical education to India in an important new way.

Why this was astonishing goes back to 2000...

On the second day of PHA's Fourth International Conference - June 24, 2000 - in the atrium of the Wyndham Hotel, Dr. Bruce Brundage, Craig Mears (then of Gentiva) and I met to talk about the possibility of publishing a medical journal.

Bruce had the reasonable concern that any publication not be "a throwaway" for the doctors who would receive it.  I saw the impact it might have but wasn't sure whether there was enough content to sustain a medical journal over the long term.  Craig was willing to talk to his company about the initial funding.

It was a different time then. There were only about 100 treating physicians in the U.S. - and they were seeing about 3,000 patients.  Only one complex and still relatively new treatment had been approved by the FDA at that point, not the nine we have today.

Several months after the Conference, Dr. Brundage (then Chair of PHA's Scientific Leadership Council) convened a telephone conference to talk about the possibility.

The group understood the potential value and decided to move forward.  Dr. Tapson at Duke was invited to become the first editor and we were off and running.  Advances in Pulmonary Hypertension: the Official Journal of the Pulmonary Hypertension Association published it's first issue in 2002.  It was a big name for a then small organization.

We were taking a huge risk for a potential large benefit. At the time of the Chicago meeting, PHA was an organization that just a year earlier had a total annual budget of $137,000.  Now we were taking on the responsibility for a new project that would cost over a quarter of a million dollars per year.  Some might say we were crazy.

As it turned out, the risk more than paid off.  Advances has published regularly in the ten years since then, reaching over 40,000 cardiologists, pulmonologists and rheumatologists four times each year, providing leadership and education from world recognized experts.  The field has grown considerably since Advances began publishing and I'm confident in saying that this journal has played an important role in that growth.

Now back to India... About 10 percent of the publication's distribution is sent to physicians in 63 nations outside the U.S. and international interest has been growing.   Over the past year, PHA has received several unsolicited requests to license international distribution and translations of Advances.

The editorial committee, led by Dr. Erika Berman Rosenzweig of Columbia University has carefully worked out a template agreement for international licensing that protects the integrity of content and allows, with PHA's editiorial review and approval, the addition of some additional content relevant to the particular nation.  Leadership of PHA's Scientific Leadership Council has approved the template.

Today, I signed our first agreement.  An Indian edition of Advances will soon be published. 

May it be as valuable to Indian physicians and their patients as Advances has been in the United States...and may it be the first of many such agreements.