Jay A. Kaplan, MD, FACEP, a Harvard Medical School graduate and five-year member of the ACEP Board of Directors, was named President-Elect of the Collage at Sunday’s Council Meeting in Chicago. Dr. Kaplan is director of service and operational excellence at CEP America and attending physician in the department of emergency medicine at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California, near San Francisco.

In his speech to the Council on Saturday, Dr. Kaplan promised to fight for all emergency physicians and pointed out that his background, willingness to listen to concerns of emergency physicians all across the world, and his current clinical practice qualify him to lead the College into the second half of this decade.

“I am a staff physician working in a community hospital trauma center seeing 37,000 patients per year in an old, undersized facility,” he said. “I still work my share of nights and weekends; I still live and breathe what you live and breathe. I know your frustrations and aggravations and I know the joy of having a day where everything seems to flow and you feel like, ‘This is why I went into emergency medicine.’”

Dr. Kaplan promised to fight for:

• A long and fulfilling career where you love your work and are paid well for the hours you care.
• An emergency department environment where emergency physicians have the resources they need to give great care to their patients and to meet any crisis; where half of the beds are not occupied by inpatients boarding; and where the data by which emergency physicians are measured is appropriate and validated.
• Dr. Kaplan said the College must continue to work hard to re-brand the image of the emergency department and to do a better job at demonstrating the value of emergency physicians.

“We are no longer just the window to the community nor can we remain the front door to the hospital,” he said. “Health care dollars will be limited and I want more in our pockets, rather than in hospitals’ and insurance companies’ coffers. We must become the porch of the medical neighborhood. We do not just care for emergencies. We are acute care diagnostic evaluation and treatment centers, because no one takes better care of patients who become suddenly ill than we do. We can no longer afford to be labeled as ‘the most expensive place to receive care’ in an era of ACOs and bundled payments. The future is ahead of schedule and we have to stay a step ahead of it.”

Dr. Kaplan, who announced his plan to resign as medical director of his group because ACEP’s President must represent all emergency physicians, said the College must focus on the big issues at the federal level, including advocacy, fair reimbursement, quality care, liability reform, and support for graduate medical education. At the same time, he said, ACEP as a representative organization must support its state chapters and be better connected with regard to local concerns. Dr. Kaplan said his background and experience working for ACEP makes him not only a qualified leader of the College, but an experienced spokesperson. He has been national faculty for ACEP, taught at the ED Directors Academy, and given the Mills and Rorrie lectures—including at ACEP14—and is a former recipient of the ACEP Outstanding Speaker of the Year Award.

“I know that the issues are different if you are a member of EMRA or mid-career, if you are a woman, a large chapter or small, more urban or more rural, a member of a national group or a single hospital practice,” Dr. Kaplan told the Council, “I am passionate about the work we do, and I am relentless—no one will work harder on your behalf.”