KK: I completely agree. It’s easy to look to the AMA for solutions and also to criticize the AMA when certain things don’t change, but it’s important to highlight the AMA can’t be responsible for everything, and it doesn’t have jurisdiction over all of these issues. Now a more broad-based question for you: on June 9 you were sworn in. What is the priority list for your year?

SS: The overarching response is that I will exist in service to the association. Steve Stack has no mission or agenda other than to ensure the success of the AMA, which is to help support our profession and the work we do for patients. That’s not a platitude; it’s real. I have no agenda. There is no Steve Stack theme. There is no, “I’m going to change the whole world to fit my image of it.” I’m going to give my very best as a practicing physician who still works days, nights, holidays, and weekends, just like other emergency docs. I’m going to give the best I can and use whatever experience I have to try to shine light on physician concerns in a way that is impactful and constructively received by policy makers and other leaders in society in the hope that we can work together to make things better for physicians in our profession and for patients.

Now, the AMA has a three-part strategic plan for people who might say, “Come on, seriously, what really are you trying to accomplish?” In addition to our enormously broad advocacy work and other things we do, we’re going to try to do three big things, and these are part of a 10-year plan.

First, and this is not rank ordered, we’re going to radically reform undergraduate medical education. Medical school has essentially the same structure it did 100 years ago when Abraham Flexner did his work and came up with a new model. It needs to be changed. We have new ways to teach, new ways to learn, new ways to assess, and a whole new collection of content—like business, finances, politics, population health, and legalities of medicine—that needs to be incorporated, which is not covered well in the current curriculum. However, you can’t just keep putting more stuff in the container. You have to change the whole shape and structure of the container so that you can do it differently. The AMA put $11 million in a five-year grant program that is working with 11 medical schools in the country in a consortium to radically pilot and reconceive a medical education. I hope that a decade after that work has begun, we’ll have a new model for medical education in the country that will serve the physicians of tomorrow better than the current model is serving them.