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Transformations in Research: Collaboration is the Key Medicare Passes, Budget Left Unfinished As Congress Wraps Up 2003 Stars of the Small Screen: The Residents of TLC's Resident Life A Word from the President: A Sweeping Look at the Year Ahead Viewpoint: We Must Strengthen Our Public Health Workforce "Portraits of Medical Education"
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A Word From the PresidentA Sweeping Look at the Year Ahead…
One predictable item of great interest this year will be the adequacy of the physician supply. After many years of concern about an impending physician surplus, we are now beginning to hear ominous projections of a serious physician shortage. Given our community's stake in this issue, and the dire health consequences of an undersupply of doctors, the association has decided to devote more attention to its workforce agenda. I announced last month the formation of the AAMC's new Center for Workforce Studies to provide a focus for our activities in this arena. The center will be led by Edward Salsberg, current executive director of the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health. Ed will join us full time in April. Irrespective of how many doctors may ultimately prove necessary to meet society's needs, improving the education and training of tomorrow's practitioners and medical scientists remains a key challenge for medical schools and teaching hospitals. The association's new Institute for Improvement in Medical Education is gearing up to help meet this challenge and is expected to be fully operational this year. A task group led by Joseph Martin, M.D., Ph.D., has been hard at work for the past several months drafting a "vision" statement for the institute that will be debated and finalized by the association's various governing councils this spring. The institute's bold mission is to stimulate programmatic innovations, strategic alliances, and decisive policy initiatives in order to enhance the effectiveness of the entire continuum of medical education. Closely related to our ongoing efforts to improve the quality of medical education is the AAMC's redoubled effort to help improve the quality of health care delivered in academic settings. Our new Center for Clinical Care Improvement is designed to assist our constituents in the complex task of implementing the best evidence-based strategies for enhancing the care provided in settings where students, residents, and other learners are engaged. One of the center's key strategies will be to facilitate collaborations among AAMC member institutions in order to promote large-scale innovations that can measurably improve the health of individuals and communities. Two pilot initiatives are already underway and will continue through 2004. One is a collaborative effort to redesign the work in in-patient teaching units so that everyone involved can benefit from less redundancy, better information flow, more collaboration, and reduced waste. The other is a collaborative effort to adapt to academic settings the well-proven model for improving chronic illness care pioneered by Edward Wagner, M.D., and described so effectively in his Cooper Lecture at our Annual Meeting last fall. In addition to pursuing these forward-looking initiatives of our own design, the association must remain attentive in the coming year to the need for reacting to the initiatives of others. One case in point, of course, is the lawsuit challenging on antitrust grounds the National Residency Matching Program. As we await the court's ruling on our 2002 motion to dismiss the suit, we are also preparing our response to the plaintiff's request that the court certify both a plaintiff and a defendant class. The slow pace of the legal process, and the mounting expenditures of time and money required to refute the groundless charges, reinforces our belief that a legislative solution is both necessary and appropriate to protect the future of the Match. Last, but not least, we can't escape the reality that 2004 is an election year and that election politics will likely dominate the political landscape until next November. Now that the hotly debated and still controversial Medicare bill has been signed into law, the arduous task of translating its myriad provisions into regulatory language will occupy much of the federal bureaucracy over the coming months - and will require intense scrutiny by all interested parties. Not to mention a host of unfinished legislative business that also will require our community's attention; examples include Medicaid reform, health coverage for the uninsured, medical liability reform, genetic testing discrimination, patient safety initiatives, and oversight of the NIH. So, we look ahead to yet another busy year for academic medicine. Life doesn't seem to be getting any easier - but then again, sustaining the values we all believe in has never been easy. Have a joyous New Year!
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Contact Us © 1995-2008 AAMC Terms and Conditions Privacy Statement |
2004
promises to be yet another eventful year for academic medicine...and
for the AAMC. Here are some of the items that we can confidently
predict will occupy a good deal of the association's attention over
the next 12 months - recognizing that unpredictable events can,
as they so often have in the recent past, quickly take over top
spot on our agenda. 