embracing new therapies. The newrologist is data-driven, quality- and patient-centered, and business savvy. The newrologist communicates, inspires, and motivates both coworkers and patients. And the newrologist works with and is supported by the greatest professional organization that advocates for patients and its members—the AAN. The Transforming Leaders Program participants developed an exciting, comprehensive action plan for the AAN to consider: Facilitate neurologist-led teams by reframing neurology as a team-based specialty, expanding the use of advanced practice providers (APPs). We’ve welcomed more than 1,000 APPs as members of the AAN, established a consortium, and are helping to define their role and providing clinical education and training to enhance their skills and value within this team. We will harness teleneurology to enhance teams and care coordination. We will develop and promote neurologists as data-driven team leaders and provide education and training in team leadership. Furthermore, we will seek to create team care pathways for brain health across the lifespan. This can be accomplished by expanding the influence of guidelines and care pathways created by neurologists, and integrating them into primary care and preventive screening. They will specify when to refer a patient to the next level of care and specify diagnostic and preventive measures to improve patient-centered quality care. Build tools to implement innovative therapies. While many effective neurology treatments exist in all subspecialty areas of neurology and span prevention and intervention, effective treatments are often poorly utilized. This may be because the neurologist is unaware or has limited understanding of treatments. There may be challenges due to lack of skills and resources, or difficulty navigating reimbursement. The AAN has made it a strategic priority to centralize and personalize resources for our members, providing onestop shopping for the newrologist to be able to conduct advanced searches by disorder, resource type, population group, setting, date, etc. The Academy should deliver personalized content through mobile and online tools highlighting new treatments, and create new educational modules to enhance members’ skills.
Communicate the vision and purpose of the newrologist. Targeted efforts to integrate new initiatives into the AAN’s messages to our members that the AAN is an indispensable source of treatment tools and data. To the public our message will be that the neurologist is the key physician to optimize brain health. And we will affirm to payers and policymakers that neurologists are quality- and value-driven and leaders of the neurology interdisciplinary patient care team. Our profession has evolved enormously over the past 70 years, not always easily and certainly not always to our liking. The separation of neurology from psychiatry in the mid-20th century was difficult, at times contentious, but necessary for our specialty to stand on its own two feet. New treatments have successfully altered life for our patients, but required neurologists to be up-to-date on the availability and efficacy of these new agents. The support of the federal government for the elderly and poor through Medicare and Medicaid assured access to care while fostering increasing regulatory hassles for the medical community. Health care reform efforts of the past two decades have sought to bring down ever-growing, unsustainable costs while sowing confusion, frustration, and burnout in our ranks. Despite these hurdles, I hope you share my optimism for this forward-thinking view of the “newrologist.” We need to take full advantage of the exciting opportunities to intervene and prevent neurological conditions, expand the future scope of the practice of neurology, and remodel the image of the neurologist. This is a future that we neurologists must—and will—shape.
Ralph L. Sacco, MD, MS, FAHA, FAAN President, AAN rsacco@aan.com @DrSaccoNeuro on Twitter