Earlier this year HISA ran the first major member survey for five years.

We are pleased to report that 68% of members and 78% of the more engaged* members said that HISA delivers good to excellent value. We were delighted to see the many positive comments that you made and we will continue to work to improve our services and support for those who told us about problems.

Respondents ranked the five most important HISA services/benefits as: advocacy, free access to PulseIT, learning and development opportunities, the HISA Newsletter and our Communities of Practice.

Satisfaction with PulseIT and with HISA News matched importance ratings, but fell below for advocacy, learning and development opportunities and communities of practice. The biggest improvement priority was advocacy. We will outline our new advocacy initiatives here soon.

HISA had just launched monthly webinars as an exclusive member service at the time of the survey. To date the webinars have had good attendances and we hope that they will provide wider access and more learning and development opportunities for members. We have also started a project to put the best talks and presentations from all HISA events over the last two years online exclusively for members.

One of the biggest issues that HISA faces as it strives to improve member satisfaction is the immense diversity across its membership. This diversity of roles and interests is a natural result of the interdisciplinary nature of health informatics, and it’s also a challenge. Later this year we will announce a prize for the best idea on how HISA can better serve and engage its diverse community.

* We are all busy with work, family, friends and other interests. As a result, the engagement of our members varies a great deal. Just over half (54%) rated their engagement with HISA as medium or higher; these are “more engaged” members mentioned above.