ACEP President Gillian Schmitz, MD, FACEP, and ACEP Executive Director Sue Sedory also shared a preview of some of the collected stories during the FTC’s “Listening Forum on Firsthand Effects of Mergers and Acquisitions: Health Care” on April 14, 2022.

Advocating for On-the-job Protections

May 2022: ACEP strongly supports legislation under discussion in Congress that would uphold due process protections for physicians. Specifically, this legislation would enable physicians to avoid a mandatory waiver of due process rights, which many are forced to comply with as a condition of group employment. ACEP members were able to directly ask legislators to support this legislation during the 2022 Leadership & Advocacy Conference in early May.

ACEP President Gillian Schmitz, MD, FACEP, shared a preview of some of ACEP member stories about the effects of consolidation

during the FTC‘s “Listening Forum on Firsthand Effects of Mergers and Acquisitions: Health Care” on April 14.

ACEP is leading conversations with Congress and federal agencies make sure that the federal officials keeping a keen eye on physician and insurer consolidation understand emergency physicians’ concerns about the impact of consolidation on systemic issues and costs, reimbursement, and patient care.

ACEP has also introduced a resolution to the AMA’s House of Delegates calling for the AMA to develop model state legislative language and principles for federal legislation that protect physicians from corporate, workplace, and/or employer retaliation when reporting safety, harassment, or fraud concerns at their places of work.

Pulling the Curtain Back to Increase Awareness

January and February 2022: One of ACEP’s roles within the new strategic plan is to provide more education about the business of emergency medicine. To that end, ACEP’s weekly regulatory blog has posted two in-depth articles explaining: 1) recent federal efforts to address health care clinician consolidation; and 2) the increase in health care insurer consolidation.

Building ACEP’s Long-Term Advocacy Strategy

Each month, ACEP4U will highlight and expand on a specific strategic pillar. This month, we focus on the first strategic pillar—advocacy.

More than 100 ACEP members were involved in developing ACEP’s new strategic plan to guide the College for the next three to five years. Ugo Ezenkwele, MD, FACEP, was part of the planning group that developed the advocacy pillar of the plan.

“A lot of changes we want to see happen in emergency medicine cannot happen if we don‘t advocate for ourselves where the political seat of power is,” explained Dr. Ezenkwele. “I thought it was incredibly important to be able to chart a course, to talk about the issues we want to present to legislators in the next few years.” The advocacy portion of the strategic plan features five key strategies to support its work to fight for your rights across all landscapes and levels: