2013 Legislative Agenda

Advocacy

Access to Care

Provide physician input into the development and implementation of New York’s Health Benefit Exchange.
Ensure expansion of physician workforce capacity through continued funding of graduate medical education and physician loan forgiveness, scholarships, practice start-up and ambulatory care training support.
Ensure that efforts to accelerate pilot testing and adoption of the Patient Centered Medical Home and other innovative integrated care models across all payers include non-institutional settings and provide technical support to physician practices.
Encourage Medicaid reimbursement of primary care rates at Medicare levels beyond 2015.

Quality of Care and Patient Safety

Seek new opportunities to improve quality through enhanced care coordination and team-based care models.
Promote methods to increase patient safety including education on human factors that can contribute to errors and voluntary reporting of near-miss events.
Promote development of outcomes-based methodologies that encourage and support enhanced quality of patient care.
Encourage specialty-established, evidence-based quality measures, guidelines, and practice standards, among physicians and patients as measures of health care quality.
Support programs that address gaps in care transitions between various healthcare settings.
Address medical liability reform and encourage alternative systems for dispute resolution in medical liability cases, including models such as health courts and workers’ compensation or no-fault systems.

Public Health and Health Care Delivery

Encourage and support evidence-based patterns of practice that help achieve an appropriate balance between population health and individual well-being using principles of high-value, cost-conscious care.
Advocate for improvement of the care experience, better population health and reduced total cost of care.
Support programs that address chronic disease care management through prevention, screening and promotion of healthy lifestyle choices.
Support the establishment of an All Payer Database (APD) and standardization of processes that will simplify and reduce the administrative burden on physician practices.
Support a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing pending further environmental review and oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency.