Candidate for election at 2025 Annual Meeting: Kevin H. McKinney, MD

Elections will be held at the Annual Meeting of the House of Delegates on June 10, 2025.

Officers and five councils are elected by the American Medical Association House of Delegates (HOD) at the Annual Meeting. The elections are conducted during a special election session under the supervision of the Committee on Rules and Credentials and the chief teller, who are appointed by the speakers. The speaker and vice speaker are responsible for overall administration of the elections. Voting is conducted by secret ballot.

2025-2029

A thoughtful and proven leader for the AMA Council on Medical Education. Dr. McKinney has more than 30 years in medical education leadership and has successfully met the many challenges facing medical education to ensure tomorrow’s physicians are highly trained. 

Currently, he is the director of the Division of Endocrinology at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), where he leads an academic division of 15 clinical, research and education faculty. Dr. McKinney works full-time as a clinician and inpatient endocrinology consultant. 

Dr. McKinney has been involved at every level of medical education leadership and has a long history of leading teams, building consensus and moving complicated solutions forward. He has led medical education at the UME, GME and CME levels, and understands today’s pressing issues. 

His long tenure at UTMB as a course director has allowed him to work with the school’s Department of Medical Education leadership to ensure UTMB’s success through two LCME renewal cycles. 

His five-year stint on the Texas Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education, two years as the chair, has given him immense knowledge on medical workforce issues, rural education, medical licensing, graduate medical education financing and inter-specialty training requirements. 

If elected to the AMA Council on Medical Education, he will bring his experience and practicality to shape the future efforts of the council as it addresses issues impacting physicians’ education. 

“Medical education in the United States is in a never-ending process of iterative change and technological advancement. The AMA has the unique position of working with various bodies to improve the competencies and soft skills of our students, house staff, and practicing physicians. My 30 years of medical education has given me the practical experience to help shape the future of medical education. I would like to ensure that our trainees be equipped with competencies that are important for medical practice in our rapidly diversifying country and world. It is our job to ensure that such competencies remain high-quality, yet accessible. My election to the council will allow me to help work with our other council members to reach those goals.”

Dr. McKinney has served in many leadership roles on the state and national level. In Texas, he has served as the UTMB’s Endocrinology and Reproduction course director since 2009. In that position, he consistently revised and updated teaching materials, implemented curricular changes and revised testing methods. He also served as a program director for the Endocrinology Diabetes and Metabolism Fellowship for over 10 years and has prepared more than 30 endocrinology fellows for practice. 

In addition, he has held positions in the Texas Medical Association (TMA), National Medical Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinology and as the second chair of AMA’s Minority Affairs Section. He successfully led a multi-year task force to develop ethical and personal guidelines to ensure equality, diversity and inclusion within the TMA membership. 

For the past 20 years he has served as a Texas delegate to the AMA’s House of Delegates.

Dr. McKinney’s 30-year career in medical education and organized medicine has afforded him many challenges and career achievements on the state and national level. Here are just a few:

• At UTMB, he has worked for 15 years as co-director of the endocrinology and reproduction [department] for second-year medical students, where he has challenged students’ course experience to achieve above-average performance on USMLE step 1 exams.
• He has worked for 10 years as a fellowship program director and is responsible for training over 30 endocrinologists for medical practice and contributed to the expansion of endocrine practices in the state of Texas and beyond.
• As vice-chair of TMA’s Board of Councilors, he was put in charge of leading the Board’s evaluation of a divisive case involving the loss of professionalism within our association.
• As co-chair of Texas Medical Association’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) task force, he worked with members to develop a report that recognized the effect that racism had on nonmedical drivers of health, and prompted TMA to include anti-discrimination as a principle for future policy development and advocacy. The task force also developed Principles of Professional Decorum for the association.
• As Chair of AMA’s Minority Affairs Consortium, he worked with the National Medical Association to pass a resolution to establish the Commission to End Health Care Disparities. He worked with the Board of Trustees to have the MAC (now Minority Affairs Section) seated in the House of Delegates.
• As chair of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology’s (AACE) Minority Health Affairs Committee, he led efforts to develop tools that helped diverse populations improve their self-management of diabetes and other endocrine conditions. As chair of AACE’s Socioeconomics and Advocacy Committee, he worked with the association to get legislation passed through Congress that established the National Diabetes Clinical Care Commission, which evaluated existing federal clinical care activities related to diabetes and other insulin-related metabolic and autoimmune diseases.
• As speaker of the House of Delegates for the National Medical Association, he was an effective liaison between the Board and the House of Delegates members. He helped the association transition to a new executive director and effectively kept the organizational documents up to date.

Dr. McKinney has seen many curricular efforts implemented, and has mentored many students, fellows and junior faculty to achieve their professional aims. He wants to bring his experience and practicality to shape the future efforts of the council as these issues are addressed:

• Oppose diversion of Medicare GME funds to nurse-practitioner and physician-assistant programs. Diversion of fixed-formula GME funds would provide even less ability to ensure that there enough GME positions to meet the growing number of U.S. medical graduates, which will result in not having enough physician specialists to meet growing needs.
• Support devolution of medical-school objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) from the USMLE back to the individual schools. This remains a work in progress, as the centralized USMLE clinical skill exams remain suspended, but all medical schools should continue to build up the capacity for local high-quality OSCEs.
• Support for improving rural health workforce disparities. Dr. McKinney encouraged Texas medical schools to continue to recruit students from underserved rural areas, and to continue to ensure clinical experiences in rural areas, so that they may consider rural service as part of their professional career. Even practicing one to two days a week in a rural location (like Dr. McKinney does) is very impactful.
• Support of low-socioeconomic-status (SES) medical students that attend medical school. Low SES medical students may face additional challenges in completing medical school. I support the research and publication of data that identify trends for the graduation of low socioeconomic status medical students; the identification of influential factors, academic and nonacademic, for a student’s early departure from medical school or delayed graduation; and mitigation methods for preventing undue early departures.
• Development of alternative methods of support for unmatched graduating medical students. Dr. McKinney supports developing rotating internships for the limited number of graduating medical students that remain unmatched, recognizing that most of these students were of high quality, yet made poor specialty choices when interviewing.
• Oppose the elimination of academic tenure. While this is mostly a state issue, such elimination would have detrimental effects on our medical schools and health professions programs. While most academic physicians are non-tenured (including me), some physicians place a high value on achieving academic tenure, regarding it as a reflection of their level of commitment to teaching and scholarship, and as an important part of their professional standing and personal identity.

Dr. McKinney has a keen perspective over most aspects of medical education and has contributed to the success of many medical students, residents and faculty. If elected to this position, he will bring clinical, educational and organizational experiences to assist the AMA Council on Medical Education to accomplish these objectives:

• Making specialty continuing board certification relevant, fair, and accessible. While he is consistently against medical-school and graduate-medical-education curricular mandates, it is important that curricula consistently be updated to meet the needs of physicians and medical students in our modern era.
• We must make sure that the inclusion of augmented intelligence at all levels of medical education doesn’t detract from the “soft skills” of becoming a physician.
• We must ensure that residents and fellows have impactful, but not onerous, clinical training.
• Practicing physicians should not be subject to wasteful and duplicative mandatory continuing-medical-education modules.
• Finally, it is important we meet the health care workforce needs of our rapidly diversifying nation and not leave behind patients that live in our rural and inner-city urban areas.

A longtime TMA colleague, Alisa Berger, MD, of College Station, said, “It is a pleasure to listen to your ideas and comments in meetings, which are always so practical and wise.” 

"Dr. Kevin McKinney’s leadership and dedication to medical education make him an outstanding candidate for the AMA Council on Medical Education. He has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to advancing medical knowledge, mentoring future physicians, and advocating for equitable, high-quality education in medicine. His vision, expertise in Endocrinology with a lens to integrate health equity, and passion for lifelong learning will be invaluable in shaping the future of medical education." Yolanda Lawson, MD, FACOG, immediate past president, National Medical Association 

"Dr. Kevin McKinney is a dedicated, deliberate, and dependable leader who always strives to bring the most benefit to the majority of his constituents. He listens, studies, and then delivers." Gary J. Sheppard, MD

• Visit the AMA elections page for information on other candidates running for office.
• Find up to date information for the June Annual Meeting of the HOD.