'Tony Mail' - A Conversation with Tony Mazzaschi

Announcer: These are the conversations happening inside health care that are going to transform health care. The Health Care Insider is on The Scope.

Mazzaschi: I'm Tony Mazzaschi, Senior Director for Scientific Affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Interviewer: So you are obviously very well recognized in AAMC communities for what we call in Utah your [Tony Grahams]. What do you guys call those at AAMC?

Mazzaschi: Well, it really is CFAS news, which stands for Council of Faculty and Academic Societies. And the goal of the messages, which is really a LISTSERV, is to make sure that the representatives of CFAS are among the most knowledgeable faculty in the country.

Interviewer: Right. And talk about the evolution of it. Forty thousand emails? Is that . . .

Mazzaschi: Yeah. Well, it started off more than 20 years ago when I started putting fax newsletters together based on my scanning of resource material, both news clippings, magazine articles, information people provided me in original source material based on various specific areas of interest to faculty and/or research policy. As the technology evolved, it became an email LISTSERV. And it grew to the point where, right now, there's a direct distribution of about 10,000, but many of the academic societies then turn around and send it to all of their members.

What's even more startling is from our limited ability to measure whether the messages are actually getting read or not, the open rate of these email messages is sort of off the charts. We often will have more than 60 or 70% of messages being opened. And in email traffic, that's pretty outstanding.

Interviewer: So, Tony, that's a remarkably high open rate. What's the key to that success?

Mazzaschi: Well, hopefully, I'm providing content that's relevant. Some of the secret sauce is that I have content that people enjoy reading. I try to mix in a little bit of humor. I often will end with a humorous tidbit that seems relevant to academic medicine.
The other thing is I write little paragraph summaries of each item and I write them myself. And often, people will find that that summary is about all they really need. They don't have to dig deeper. And in the busy world of faculty life, that's a positive.

Interviewer: How do you collect the information?

Mazzaschi: Well, I do a lot of original searching. I spend a lot of time every morning before going into work scanning the Web and using the regular sources of just grunt work, labor and discipline, looking for items that I think would be of interest to faculty. Through my experience, I have a pretty good understanding of the various missions of academic medicine and I'm often able to put connections together, which is what I think people like to see and hear.

Interviewer: So, Tony, what do you see as academic medicine's impossible problem?

Mazzaschi: In a short run, the funding situation at the federal level is affecting every academic mission one way or another. The challenge of how we continue to undertake the vital missions of academic medicine with fewer resources is a daunting task. One can look at it as a negative; one can also look at it as a forced opportunity. How can we do better with less, rather than how can we do more with less.

Interviewer: This is your chance so what do you want to receive from people? What's your call to action for AAMC members?

Mazzaschi: Well, if there are faculty that would like to subscribe to the LISTSERV, of course, it's free and I'm more than happy to add people. They can just send an email message to CFAS@aamc.org. If they have news tips they'd like me to pass on, I'm more than willing to accept them and to consider them.
But I guess lastly, I would just think that it's an obligation amongst faculty members, of all faculty members, to stay informed about the public policy issues that involve academic medicine and its future. And to the extent that I might be able to contribute to that, all the better.

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