AMA helps physicians care for patients

A guest column by the American Medical Association, exclusive to KevinMD.com.

As the nation’s largest physician organization, the American Medical Association (AMA) is uniquely positioned to help physicians thrive in medical practice throughout the stages of their careers.

Because the AMA is led by physicians, we understand the many demands and rigors physicians face as they work to provide high-quality patient care, and we are proud to support physicians in their life’s work. We’re listening to what practicing physicians need from AMA, and we’re hearing they would benefit from help with practice management, health information technology (IT), quality improvement and continuing medical education (CME). Here are a few of the key resources we’ve created based on the needs of physicians. They can also be found at www.ama-assn.org under the Physician Resources tab.

Practice Management: The AMA’s Practice Management Center offers educational resources and interactive tools to help physicians optimize their practice and patient care. Physicians can focus on caring for patients instead of battling health insurers over contracts, payments and paperwork. This year, the AMA launched the National Managed Care Contract and database, a first-of-its-kind online tool designed to help physicians analyze and negotiate better contracts with insurers. The AMA’s newest resource is Practice Analysis Tools for Health Care or AMA PATH. This groundbreaking online application gives physicians access to knowledge typically only offered by expensive consultants. Now, physicians can see how their practice looks to auditors and then implement improvements to help safeguard against an audit.

Health IT: The AMA’s Health IT Webinars can help physicians evaluate and adopt health IT, as well as understand how they can meet new federal “meaningful use” requirements and qualify for incentive payments. To help physicians make informed decisions about electronic prescribing, the AMA established the ePrescribing Learning Center. We will be launching nationwide a new AMA Web-based platform called AMAGINE^TM for practicing physicians that will provide access to products and services aimed at improving patient care, reducing administrative burdens, and easing adoption of evolving health IT.

Quality Improvement: The AMA-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) is the leader in the field of quality measure development, with more than 270 quality measures for health care conditions like hypertension, asthma and heart failure already developed. Recognizing that physician involvement and leadership are critical to physician acceptance and use, more than 170 member groups provide PCPI with expertise in the measure development process. The hard work is paying-off with Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting Initiative and quality improvement demonstration projects using PCPI measures.

CME: To help make it easier for physicians to meet CME requirements, the AMA offers a wide range of activities that foster physician lifelong learning and reward it with AMA PRA Category 1 Credit. Examples of the CME activities include online webcasts about disease treatment and common patient concerns, and printable material such as the AMA Physicians’ Guide to Assessing and Counseling Older Drivers.

Communication: In order to keep physicians abreast of breaking medical and health policy news, the AMA recently launched a new electronic weekly newsletter, AMA Wire. It is easy to read and can be customized to each physician’s needs and interests. Also recently published is the first volume of AMA Advantage, a concise resource guide that highlights the latest AMA products and services. Physicians can also subscribe to our daily Morning Rounds news email that summarizes medical news from across the country and our weekly Health System Reform Insight newsletter that helps to explain the health reform law and what it means to your practice.

In addition to these key resources that help physicians in their day-to-day practice, AMA advocacy – in Washington, D.C., statehouses and in the courts – provides physicians with a strong voice on issues that matter to physicians and patients.

The AMA worked closely with bipartisan members of Congress to delay a 25 percent Medicare cut through the end of 2011, allowing time for Congress to craft a long-term solution to this perennial problem. We’re developing model legislation that will allow physicians and patients to privately contract for health care services. The AMA is making headway to ease antitrust restrictions so that physicians can lead new models of care, like accountable care organizations, without worrying that they will run afoul of the law. We continue to call for medical liability reform, and there’s growing recognition that it will help reduce unnecessary health care costs.

The Litigation Center of the AMA and State Medical Societies is a vital legal advocate, and the AMA’s recent victory over United Health for its use of a flawed database to reimburse at an artificially lower amount for out-of-network services was a win for patients and physicians. As a result, UnitedHealth is paying $350 million to help compensate patients and physicians. The Litigation Center’s docket of cases, many with precedent-setting results, covers a wide range of topics across the medical-legal landscape cover topics such as physician payment, medical staff privileges, medical liability, peer review and scope-of-practice.

Many of these tools, and others, including a Healthier Life Steps toolkit that helps physicians talk to patients about healthy lifestyles, are easily accessible on the AMA’s Web site. Some of these are member-only resources, and physicians can benefit from the AMA’s wide range of benefits by joining the AMA. We’re committed to helping physicians throughout all stages of their medical career, and if you’d like to talk to me about what else we can be doing I encourage you to sign-up for my monthly “Office Hours” call, free and open to all AMA members.

I’d like to wish my fellow physicians and their patients health and happiness this holiday season and in the New Year.