The second is to improve health outcomes for the nation by tackling big public health concerns. We are going to work on the proper diagnosis and effective treatment of hypertension. There are 70 million people in the country with hypertension and tens of millions of them who are either not diagnosed or not properly treated. They have preventable harm happen that we should not allow. The next is the diabetes epidemic. If we don’t fix that, we’re going to have an incredible burden of human illness and disease in our population, something that will be economically unsustainable and humanly intolerable. We know that if we institute lifestyle programs that sustainably alter people’s diet choices, exercise choices, and activity choices, we can profoundly reduce the number of people who are in a prediabetic state who convert to diabetes. We are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the YMCA of the USA, and others to come up with ways that, on a national level, we can catalyze the change that we all know needs to happen.

The third and final thing is that we are working doggedly to improve physician professional satisfaction and practice sustainability. We are trying to find out about things that make doctors happy and things that make them sad and frustrated. If those things are either directly within our sphere of control as individual doctors or the AMA and/or within our sphere of strong influence, we can intervene and make life better for physicians. I think the profession feels a bit downtrodden and run-over right now, with everyone shouting at us to do what they want us to do and nobody really supporting us in what we need to do.