The American Medical Association just held its House of Delegates Annual meeting in Chicago in person for the first time since 2019, and the meeting was a success for emergency medicine. The AMA House of Delegates is an important component of advocacy that ACEP does on your behalf at the federal, state, and local level, through its sponsorship of a strong delegation of emergency physician representatives.
For example, a resolution that ACEP developed and introduced at this year’s meeting to strengthen due process protections for both employed and contracted physicians was successfully adopted by the House of Delegates this week. This is a significant development for emergency physicians, as it means that the entire House of Medicine and the AMA’s significant resources will now be fighting to ensure due process protections for physicians at both the federal and state level, rather than EM having to fight this alone.
As well, ACEP was able to add strong language to another resolution that was adopted to specifically exempt EMTALA-related care from federal requirements to consult appropriate use criteria when ordering advanced imaging.
Emergency medicine was also well represented in election proceedings at the meeting, with Marilyn J. Heine, MD, FACEP, newly elected to the AMA’s Board of Trustees, and Stephen K Epstein, MD, MPP, FACEP, re-elected to the Council on Medical Service. With emergency physicians in these prominent roles, emergency medicine is well positioned to leverage this strong voice in the House of Medicine to advocate for improvements for the profession.
Related: In the June 2022 Board Blog, ACEP President Gillian Schmitz, MD, FACEP, talks about her experience at the AMA Meeting and gives updates on scope of practice, ACGME, consolidation and more.
