Legacy of Excellence Digital Flipbook

LEGACY OF EXCELLENCE

When he turned his work over to Dr. House for presentation during the study group meeting that was scheduled before the AAO-HNSF Annual Meeting, Dr. House surprised him. “Miyamoto, I’d like to have you present this for me,” he recollected Dr. House saying. “So, there I am in front of all these people trying to present this paper and trying to become brave. I look out there, and thought, ‘who in this audience knows more than me?’ And the answer is, everybody I see.” That was Dr. Miyamoto’s first time presenting to a senior group of otolaryngologists assembled for an Annual Meeting. There would be many more presentations to come. Upon completing the fellowship, Dr. Miyamoto returned to Indiana, and not long after, Dr. William House invited him to join a clinical trial on the cochlear implant, which was successful in changing forever communication options for the deaf. By the late 1980s, Dr. Miyamoto had assumed leadership roles in the specialty. He became chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Indiana in 1987, a position he held for 27 years. As a young physician, he was asked to serve on the charter advisory council for the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and at the time had two grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other leadership positions followed, and he became president of the American Neurotology Society in 2000. His path to the presidency at AAO-HNS/F began with service on multiple committees. By 2005 and 2006, several changes in the healthcare environment were impacting otolaryngology and its practitioners. One was the Stark II legislation that essentially restricted corporate support to medical providers in 1993; but was expanded, implemented, and litigated in the years that followed. Funding for many society programs and research by corporate entities had stopped, leaving many programs without funding. At the same time, otolaryngologists were anticipating a scheduled significant cut in the Sustainable Growth Rate payments for key procedures and specialties were being challenged to provide data that supported care decisions. David R. Nielsen, MD, AAO-HNS/F EVP and CEO, had foreseen the need for evidence-based care decisions in otolaryngology. Addressing the data to guide quality care became an urgent agenda, and Dr. Miyamoto’s

experience—within the NIH advisory panel where he worked closely with Maureen Hannley, PhD, who became the Academy’s chief research officer, and his own experience as president of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and chair of the American Otologic Society’s Research Fund—were tailored to support these needs. With this environment in the background, Dr. Miyamoto was nominated and elected to serve as AAO HNS/F President from 2006-2007. As President-elect, he began to work with AAO-HNS/F leadership on plans to increase the organization’s support of research. While the Foundation had offered research grants since 1985, in working with Dr. Hannley, the Combined Otolaryngology Research (CORE) grants program expanded its reach even further during Dr. Miyamoto’s presidency. The intent was to build grant successes. “In this smaller grant program, people can acquire that skill so they can eventually qualify to get an NIH grant,” Dr. Miyamoto underscored. In his presidential column in the June 2007 Bulletin , Dr. Miyamoto wrote, “The Academy stands ready to be a unifying entity across the breadth of our specialties. Our CORE grant program exemplifies this concept, by providing opportunities for subspecialty research. Through this program, young residents are given the opportunity to learn about the grant process. This year the CORE grants program has taken a unifying approach across participating societies, resulting in a 60 percent increase if funding since last year.” During his term, Dr. Miyamoto parlayed another NIH-related connection to the benefit of the Academy. Having NIH research grants over the years and serving on its advisory council, he was invited by NIH director Elias Zerhouni, MD, to give the NIH Director’s Sixth Astute Clinician Lecture. In turn, Dr. Miyamoto invited Dr. Zerhouni to give the Neel Distinguished Research Lecture at the Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. “It was standing room only, our members really showed up for that, they filled the whole ballroom, and there were people standing on the aisles all the way around the room, wanting to hear Elias Zerhouni, because it’s not every year, we have the director of NIH giving the lecture, but he did that year for me.” As Dr. Miyamoto’s presidency concluded, he wrote in the September 2007 Bulletin , “I hope that my presidency will be assessed based on my ability to contribute to overall quality in the field of otolaryngology.”

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