Henry Z. Pitzele, MD, FACEP

(Illinois)

Current Professional Positions: Chief informatics officer and attending physician, Jesse Brown VA Medical Center and Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago; attending physician, Mesa View Regional Medical Center, Mesquite, Nevada; attending physician, Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago

Internships and Residency: emergency medicine residency, University of Illinois at Chicago (2023)

Medical Degree: MD, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine (2000)

Response

There are some elements of EM which have always made our specialty attractive—our ability to truly care for people in their time of need, to take care of anything and anyone, any time, in any place, and the freedom to do so in discrete and prescheduled shifts. The attractive elements have not changed, and will not—but the last two Matches show that the outlook on the future of EM has changed, and ACEP can and must focus our most fundamental organs—those of advocacy and communication—towards even stronger defenses of workforce, autonomy, compensation, and community.

Our efforts on workforce are ongoing, but we can do even more—we have engaged the greater EM community and the ACGME, but exploring other partnerships (such as ABEM) can help us further demonstrate the value of EPs. More resources for public relations and increased support for definitive, original research could further bolster the greater public acceptance of the obvious good of physician-led teams. But where we excel, and where we can really create change, is in DC; it is time to commit to legislation regarding GME funding, which will help us not only with supply-side workforce increases, but also with distributive imbalances (urban vs. rural). Workforce cannot be an afterthought for the College.

While on the topic of legislative advocacy, it is time to legitimately explore legislation to end the Medicare funding cycle. ACEP is the only EM organization who has (and who can) step up and fight for our compensation from CMS, but every year at LAC, I sit in congressional offices describing our ever-decreasing compensation, and hear the same refrain from lawmakers: “This isn’t a good year to talk about this.” Well, given the state of EM recruiting, this must be the year we talk about permanent legislation for Medicare increases.

We must also continue (and amplify) our fight against consolidation. Our March letter to the FTC decrying non-competes and our April letter to CMS about ownership disclosures were just an opening salvo—our attractiveness as a specialty will continue to plummet if the frontline EPs’ sense of autonomy continues to erode, and EM consolidation is a direct cause of this erosion. We need to not only work against consolidation through our governmental interfaces, but in our own business practices as well.