ACP News
The American College of Physicians (ACP) recently met in Philadelphia. At the annual session, they discussed a comprehensive approach to redesign how Internal Medicine is taught, delivered and financed.
They understand the importance of the need to perform a major overhaul because of the looming crisis in primary care and especially Internal Medicine. They clearly see the decline in students desire to enter this field and at the rate of the diminishing programs, we will begin to feel the impact in the next few years. Any change now will not really impact the crisis for upwards of 10 years.
There are three major areas of focus:
1. Internal Medicine resident training
2. patient care
3. reforming the payment system
The statistics showed that in 1998 general Internal Medicine constituted 54% of physicians, but by 2003 that percentage was only 23%. The ACP has noted that the interest in the program began a decline a few years ago and will be critical as the population ages with more complicated medical problems and chronic diseases.
The key issues for the decline were found to be the dysfunctional payment system by Medicare with the other insurers following behind, the training program itself being vastly different than private practice, and the cost and indebtedness of the residents.
The ACP stated the future supply of primary care physicians, especially those in office-based medicine will not be able to meet the growing needs of an aging population.
Through three new position papers, they went on to state that our current system continually places obstacles in the way of primary care physicians, forcing many to choose other venues.
The second position paper states the current payment system limits innovation and devalues the skills and quality services that general internists and primary care physicians provide.
The third position paper speaks to the need of completely redesigning the training program. The overall experience hasn’t changed in years even though there have been major changes in medicine.
The ACP has the right ideas. They need to rapidly implement them as we are already seeing a steady transition out of Internal Medicine and primary care.
They understand the importance of the need to perform a major overhaul because of the looming crisis in primary care and especially Internal Medicine. They clearly see the decline in students desire to enter this field and at the rate of the diminishing programs, we will begin to feel the impact in the next few years. Any change now will not really impact the crisis for upwards of 10 years.
There are three major areas of focus:
1. Internal Medicine resident training
2. patient care
3. reforming the payment system
The statistics showed that in 1998 general Internal Medicine constituted 54% of physicians, but by 2003 that percentage was only 23%. The ACP has noted that the interest in the program began a decline a few years ago and will be critical as the population ages with more complicated medical problems and chronic diseases.
The key issues for the decline were found to be the dysfunctional payment system by Medicare with the other insurers following behind, the training program itself being vastly different than private practice, and the cost and indebtedness of the residents.
The ACP stated the future supply of primary care physicians, especially those in office-based medicine will not be able to meet the growing needs of an aging population.
Through three new position papers, they went on to state that our current system continually places obstacles in the way of primary care physicians, forcing many to choose other venues.
The second position paper states the current payment system limits innovation and devalues the skills and quality services that general internists and primary care physicians provide.
The third position paper speaks to the need of completely redesigning the training program. The overall experience hasn’t changed in years even though there have been major changes in medicine.
The ACP has the right ideas. They need to rapidly implement them as we are already seeing a steady transition out of Internal Medicine and primary care.
posted by Anonymous at 5:59 AM
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