Ardis Dee Hoven, MD

I recently spent two days in Detroit at the Henry Ford Health System—and what I learned there is too exciting not to share. The system has hosted an annual Quality Exposition for 23 years, during which health care teams from throughout its integrated system demonstrate new ways to make patient care safe, patient-centered, timely, efficient, effective and equitable.

As my time as AMA president comes to an end, I’m reflecting on what I’ve learned while spending more than two-thirds of the year on the road and talking to physicians across the country about their concerns.

I’ve spent much of the past year talking with physicians around the country about the issues that matter most to them and listening to the challenges they face every day.

It’s been about a month since the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released its raw physician Medicare claims data, drawing a great deal of attention from the press and leaving physicians to provide context about the data to patients. 

Although my time as AMA president begins to wind down, I’m looking toward the future. The AMA has worked hard over the past year to propel its three strategic focus areas forward, and we’ve made astonishing progress.

I posed an important question in an AMA Viewpoints post two weeks ago: Would the bipartisan legislative policy for repealing Medicare’s sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula turn into a missed opportunity? For Congress, it certainly did. For physicians, the story is more complicated.

I had a true “aha” moment earlier this month when I was in Washington, D.C., for the AMA’s National Advocacy Conference. It was one of those moments of heightened awareness that comes from a fundamental realization that applies not to an isolated issue but to a broad spectrum of life.