Pub. 3 2019 Issue 2

I had the privilege of representing the AAFP board of directors at the 2019 annual meeting of the Utah Academy of Family Physicians (UAFP). The meeting was held on May 10 at the Doubletree Hotel, located in Utah’s state capital, Salt Lake City. The week before arriving in Salt Lake City, I was in the breathtakingly scenic Appalachian Mountains of New Hampshire. I arrived on the other side of the country in Salt Lake City to a view of the stunningly ma- jestic snow-capped Rocky Mountains. This was my first visit to Utah. Utah is nicknamed the Beehive State, but I do not recall seeing any bees during my visit. Perhaps they were vacationing elsewhere. What I did see was the city of Salt Lake City buzzing with activity. Utah’s state song is “Utah, This is The Place.” Sam and Gary Francis wrote the song in 1996 for Utah’s centennial celebration. In 1847, religious leader Brigham Young reportedly said, “This is the place,” when he first saw the Salt Lake valley while leading Latter- day Saint settlers westward through the Rocky Mountains. In advance of my arrival in Utah, I had asked if UAFP staff could arrange for me to meet with some medical students, residents, and visit a typical Utah family medicine clinical practice. The UAFP fulfilled each of my requests. On the af- ternoon of my arrival, I was taken to two clinical practice sites in Salt Lake City to observe how both residents and typical clinical practices operate. The residency practice had recently adopted a new electronic health record (EHR) system — along with new system challenges. The second site we visited was an older facility about to transition to a new clini- cal location later this year. The UAFP annual meeting began with a legislative update presented by Maryann Martindale, UAFP’s executive director. Ms. Martindale highlighted a few legislative wins for the UAFP: A bill requiring advanced patient billing transparency was defeated; a bill requiring cognitive testing to prove competency in older physicians was “watered down” to the point of not be- ing relevant for most practicing physi- cians; a prior authorization legislation will require a 72-hour turnaround time; and Tobacco 21 was passed. The legislative update was followed with recognition of retiring UAFP Board members for their many years of service. Dr. Ray Ward (also a Utah State Representative) was presented with the 2019 Utah Family Medicine Advocate of the Year Award, and Dr. David Cope received the 2019 Utah Family Physician of the Year Award. The evening concluded with my AAFP update. The UAFP’s top three priori- ties are Advocacy, Member Engage- ment and Member Value (Is being a member valuable?). I attempted to fo- cus on these areas. During the ques- tion and answer portion of my presen- tation the two most concerning issues were about: 1) the need to remove the graduate medical education caps to allow the number of family medicine residency programs to expand in rural areas with health care shortages; and 2) the dysfunctional EHR systems requiring us to force-feed them with quality measures that do not matter if our goal is to achieve a better patient care outcome. Dr. Ward was particu- larly vocal — in a respectable way — regarding what role the AAFP can play in finding a remedy to the EHR co- nundrum. In response, I updated the audience on the 25 by 30 initiative, the Teaching Health Center legislation, GME funding efforts, and our work in the area of speaking directly with major EHR vendors, the X-prize, and Family Physicians | Continued on page 8 Keeping Family Physicians in the Driver’s Seat By Gary LeRoy, M.D., FAAP 7 |