The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has over 137,000 physician members and is one of the largest medical organizations in the country. While some physicians who specialize in pediatrics, OB/GYN, internal medicine, and psychiatry also provide primary care, the vast majority of primary care still comes from family medicine physicians. Interests within the AAFP vary widely and include all sorts of topics such as rural medicine, LGBTQ care, population health, direct primary care, point of care ultrasound, and many others.
Dr. Sterling Ransone will be the outgoing AAFP President and incoming Chair of the Board of Directors this week. Throughout his career, he has primarily been a rural primary care physician in Deltaville, VA as part of a large hospital system. He has an extensive history with organized medicine, having previously served as President of the Virginia Academy of Family Physicians and the Medical Society of Virginia among many other leadership roles. He’s a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, formerly Medical College of Virginia, where Paulius and I also graduated (in fact, Dr. Ransone and I attended the same college, medical school, and residency). Part of his current role involves travelling the country and speaking with hundreds of frontline physicians about what is important to them and hearing their unique experiences. His background and current role give him a robust understanding of the primary care field landscape from the physician point of view. We sat down together a couple months ago to draw from his experiences as we discuss the future of primary care and many of the factors which our affecting our landscape today. Check out the first of our interviews on the future of primary care.
Medicare payments. Prevention over disease treatment. Inflation. COVID-19 vaccination. Value based care. This is in the first 5 minutes of this video. Thank you to Dr. Qiu for doing the interview. But this is going to be the rhetoric over the next few decades in primary care: how to get more of the healthcare spending dollars.
I appreciate what organizations like AAFP do but it's the opposite direction of what I want my practice to look like and how I want my own primary care doctor to be.