the Affordable Care Act, and going back to organized medicine and getting a seat at the table so we can talk about payment systems and reorganizing the way that we provide care. How can physicians be involved in this effort? My first thought is to create an SCMA passbook. You would have in there all the potential things you could do to be involved in the physician family of Sonoma County. That might include going to a social function or participating in something that is happening in the community. We have a tremendous community in terms of community support and organizations and nonprofits. It’s just a matter of finding how we can partner with those. If you take that passbook and sign up for Walk with a Doc, or join the access committee, or whatever the list of things is, then you get credit for those things. These are all of the things that we do that can get you involved in being part of our community and promoting
health. At the end of the year, maybe you get so many raffle tickets for the number of points you got, and you get a chance to win an iPad or something like that. The passbook is a way to promote the organization and get people involved. From your perspective, what are the main benefits of membership in SCMA and CMA? I think the benefits of membership fall under two basic categories. One is the business of medicine and organized medicine, and that’s because we don’t practice in a vacuum, we practice in the real world. We certainly have fantastic successes to show there, such as the GPCI fix and the SGR. There are lots of things we can point to and say, “If not for CMA and organized medicine, things would be different than they are now.” That’s a very rational argument. I can sit down and justify why I’m writing the membership check, because I can see a tangible benefit. There’s also an intangible part,
which is what I was alluding to before, and that is the community, the family of being a physician. Dr. Robert Pearl (CEO of The Permanente Medical Group) recently wrote a great article for Forbes. com about what it means to be sitting in a room with a patient: that intimate relationship, the things that patients share with you that don’t happen anywhere else. It takes years to learn that, and no one else can really appreciate what it’s like to be there other than another physician. So there is a family, a tribe, that being a physician means. That’s the message that we are going to try to distill this year, that there are all of these tangible things, but really you have to want to be part of the group. You can rationalize writing the check when you think about all the things you’re getting back for it. But if your only thing is dollars and cents and the bottom line, then that’s running a business. And for some people, that’s maybe what it is. But for most of us, I think it needs to be this: this is the group, this is my tribe.
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26 Summer 2014
Sonoma Medicine