ACP: Revitalization of Internal Medicine

About ACP

Revitalization of Internal Medicine

In 2004, ACP leaders discussed their efforts to address educational, professional, financial, legislative and quality-of-life issues that impact patient care and internal medicine. ACP is helping to facilitate a national initiative to address the challenges in today’s health care environment that affect patient care and compromise the future of primary care.

This initiative is in collaboration with the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, the American Board of Internal Medicine, and the Society of General Internal Medicine, the Society of Hospital Medicine, the Council of Subspecialty Societies and other organizations. ACP students, associates and young physicians, internists practicing in hospital and community/office settings, general internists and internal medicine subspecialists are a very important part of the initiative.

“No one organization or entity or group of physicians can accomplish the complex goal of revitalizing internal medicine,” said Mary Herald, MD, FACP, chair of the ACP Board of Regents. “Together with our colleagues, we’ve defined the core challenges and are poised to move surely and confidently toward those goals.”

As a result of an ACP-hosted summit meeting of all participating organizations, four overarching goals were set to achieve the revitalization of internal medicine:

Repair a dysfunctional payment system, by reforming parts of the current system, developing new models of care and payment, and addressing medical education issues such as mounting student debt and declining funding of medical education.
Improve efficiency in practice and reduce hassles, through recommendations for practice improvement, innovation and appropriate-quality care.
Define the value of internal medicine to the public and the health care system.
Develop education and training for a new world, by revamping current and traditional training programs and designing new residency and ongoing education programs around multidisciplinary teams, coordination of care, disease management and quality improvement.

The ACP Board of Regents considered new policies that called for standards to significantly improve exchange of electronic health care information and suggested using the patient-physician relationship as a mechanism for revitalization. These new policies build on earlier efforts.

ACP’s revitalization effort dates to 2002, when the organization’s governing boards declared revitalization a priority for all boards, committees and administration. Since then, the College has issued an ongoing series of revitalization position papers: