As the year immediately following a national election, 2017 may lead physicians to want to relax and recover from such a tumultuous election. However, we must continue to advocate for our patients and our role as physician anesthesiologists in perioperative care, critical care medicine, pain medicine and medicine as a whole. Anesthesiologists need to plan and prepare for future success in a rapidly evolving and value-based health care system. We must remain vigilant.
I divide our advocacy challenges into four major areas: Value, Risk, Volume and Workforce (Figure 1).
Maintaining our value in patient care seems easy, but there are a number of forces to diminish our roles as physicians. Disruptive public policies are not just an existential threat. The right policies can drive innovation, not stifle it. New policies enable new technologies and new practice models to emerge, evolve and grow. A disruptive change in policy was...
