By David Pittman, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today CHICAGO -- The AIDS epidemic hit right around the time Ardis Hoven, MD, started getting heavily involved in organized medicine.
The infectious disease specialist took the insights gained from her front-line experience with the epidemic and used it to influence health policy. When she become a delegate to the American Medical Association's (AMA) policy-making House of Delegates in the early '90s, the organization was developing its policies on covering the uninsured.
"What was happening to these patients, the devastation in their lives, their loss of health insurance became a huge issue for me because I saw the implications of it," Hoven told MedPage Today. "That really empowered me, I think, to speak quite strongly for the uninsured."
She took advantage of leadership opportunities both within her home state of Kentucky and the AMA to fight for those patients and Tuesday night Hove was inaugurated as the AMA's 168th president.
"If you would have told me 20 years ago I would be doing this, I would have thought you were somewhat delusional," said Hoven, who hails from Lexington. "It really wasn't in my long-range plans by any means."
Yet she became the Kentucky Medical Association president in 1993 and served in various AMA leadership roles after that, most recently as Board of Trustees chair from 2010-2011.
But it's her experience in the clinic that most profoundly shapes her work.
"I bring to the table as a voice of the AMA real-life issues that afflict patients, that affect access to care, and affect physicians and how they practice," Hoven said.
In her inaugural address, she encouraged her fellow physicians to take an active role in reform efforts, and not passively sit on the sidelines.
"Change ... can be good," said Hoven, one of five female graduates in her medical school class at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "Change, though, has to reflect the needs of the patients and the physicians who take care of them."
As AMA president, she will continue to push for established AMA principles, including improving health outcomes for patients and better physician satisfaction.
But physicians have to recognize that the diversity of doctors' practices in the country will take more than a one-size-fits-all model.
"We have to recognize that in Kentucky, for example, in rural eastern Kentucky, a small practice is what is there," Hoven told MedPage Today in a video interview. "It needs to be viable and doing what it needs to do for that community."
Improving medical education is another key topic for the AMA, she said. The AMA needs to help medical schools develop environments that allow students to learn to practice in team-based models, and to practice 21st-century medicine.
"We've got to make sure their education is timely," said Hoven, who wanted to be a plastic surgeon when she first started medical school. "It's competency based and yet when they come out, when they finish, they are ready to practice, they have the tools in hand, they know how to run a medical practice, they know how to do the quality work that needs to be done."
Like her recent predecessors, Hoven said repealing Medicare's sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula is a priority for her. The AMA is helping Congress draft legislation for a physician payment system to supplant the SGR, and progress is being made, she said.
"I am more optimistic now than I've been about this in a long period of time," she said. "We will continue to push on this, and I will be a person at the table frequently to talk about this."
Also on Tuesday, the House of Delegates elected Robert Wah, MD, a reproductive endocrinologist and obstetrician/gynecologist in the Washington area, to be its president-elect, who will take over as president in June 2014.
The 23-year veteran of the U.S. Navy Medical Corps now practices and teaches at Walter Reed National Military Center in Bethesda, Md., and at the National Institutes of Health.
Wah is also a recognized health information technology (IT) expert and former deputy national coordinator of Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services.
David Pittman
David Pittman is MedPage Today’s Washington Correspondent, following the intersection of policy and healthcare. He covers Congress, FDA, and other health agencies in Washington, as well as major healthcare events. David holds bachelors’ degrees in journalism and chemistry from the University of Georgia and previously worked at the Amarillo Globe-News in Texas, Chemical & Engineering News and most recently FDAnews.
No comments:
Post a Comment