Nov. 21, 2025: Advocacy Update spotlight on the 2025 AMA Interim Meeting

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Contents
  1. Highlights from the 2025 AMA Interim Meeting
  2. More articles in this issue

Highlights from the 2025 AMA Interim Meeting

The AMA House of Delegates addressed a range of critical issues impacting the nation’s health care system at the 2025 Interim Meeting, which took place Nov. 14-18 in National Harbor, Maryland. 

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On Friday, AMA CEO and Executive Vice President John Whyte, MD, MPH, and AMA President Bobby Mukkamala, MD, opened the meeting with remarks to attendees. 

Some key topics at the meeting included: 

  • Prior authorization: Delegates took several actions to push back against this payer practice, including adopting a resolution for the AMA to “advocate that low-cost medications and procedures should not require prior authorization.”  

  • Scope of practice: Four substantial policy actions were taken to defend physician-led, team-based care against inappropriate scope of practice expansions. This included modifying existing policy on laser surgery, adopting new policy on doula services, adopting new policy on deceptive advertising of nonphysicians’ training, and modifying existing policy to support research on specialty switching of physician assistants and nurse practitioners.  

  • Augmented intelligence (AI): Delegates approved a resolution that aims to create safeguards to protect patients and physicians from deepfake technology. Separately, delegates also adopted policy to expand AI training in medical education.

  • Rural health care: Delegates adopted several policies to sustain and strengthen access to care for patients in rural areas, including policy supporting minimum standards for alternative payment models to rural hospitals.  

  • Substance use disorder treatment: A House-passed resolution calls on the AMA to advocate to remove “red flag” or suspicious order designations for ordering FDA-approved products to treat opioid use disorder (OUD). The resolution also calls for the AMA to remove all barriers to medications for OUD, including prior authorization, fair-first and step-therapy policies.  

To learn more, see the full overview of daily meeting highlights. 

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