Medicine's democracy in action: Coming soon at the AMA meeting

The AMA House of Delegates will convene next month for its Annual Meeting, following a tradition of grassroots policy development that has been in place for more than a century.

Editorial. May 22/29, 2006.

Doctors are all about giving answers. What kind of medicine should I take? Was the surgery successful? Am I going to be all right? All day, they hear these questions from patients who trust in their judgment. It is only natural, then, that these same patients, and the nation overall, would expect physicians to have answers of another kind -- answers to macro-level questions about the complex and critical issues facing health care in America. After all, physicians who toil in medicine's trenches have a unique perspective on the challenges at hand.

The American Medical Association's House of Delegates is tasked with finding answers that translate these insights into action.

Soon, starting June 10 to be exact, the AMA's Annual Meeting will convene in Chicago with an expected 544 delegates in attendance. They will represent every state medical society, every qualifying national medical specialty society, the military, the Veterans' Administration and the Public Health Service, among others.

These dedicated physician volunteers will come together to do their part to shape the future of medicine. The work they will do is intense, the opinions are passionate and the debate is sometimes fierce. The results provide guidance on topics from professional standards to public health and federal legislation.

Already on the meeting's docket are about 80 reports; at press time, resolutions were still being filed. Predicting which among them will be the hottest or generate the most news coverage is always difficult. But it is the outcome that is really important, anyway. At recent meetings, resolutions have led the house to address a range of timely subjects -- everything from pandemic planning to standards for emerging pay-for-performance programs.