Politico will be holding a Health Care Breakfast Briefing tomorrow, March 19, 2013 beginning at 8am Eastern TIme. The topic will be "Defining The Scope Of Practice." You can watch the free live video stream at this link.
The panelists include the following: Wanda Filer, MD (AAFP Board of Directors), Angela Golden, DNP (President of American Association of Nurse Practitioners), and Donna Shalala (former secretary of HHS).
There will definitely be verbal fireworks between the AAFP and the AANP representatives that started with the AAFP Report "Primary Care For the 21st Century" stating that Independent Practice NPs "threatens to splinter care and undermine PCMH." Of course, the AANP disagreed with this report and released their own statement. There have been other opinions about this disagreement on Modern Healthcare and KevinMD. In addition, the current AAFP President Elect wrote this letter to a recent Bloomberg News Article.
Not only will there be strong opinions on stage, but also on social media as well. A recent example of this was the twitter stream during the live broadcasts of the Escape Fire film on CNN using the #RescueHealthcare hashtag. As I stated in a previous post, I believe that Family Medicine and Primary Care missed an opportunity to be proactive in portraying a positive message for our specialty.
I hope that the discussion does not degrade to personal or professional attacks on stage and on social media. Primary care physicians and primary care nurses must both build their workforces. We can't build one at the expense of the other. The Patient Centered Medical Home focuses on tailoring care to the patient by deploying a team of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, sub specialists, and any other health professional who work together to meet the patient's needs.
So, again, I'm challenging the Family Medicine community to not only tune in tomorrow morning at 8am for the live video stream, but also I challenge the Family Medicine community to be proactive and participate on twitter using the #ProHCBB hashtag in addition to #AAFP to help spread the message. Will #FMRevolution rise to the occasion? We'll see...