Speaking to Power With Power: Advocating for Your Profession.

Abstract

Patient-centered physician-directed care is facing unprecedented challenges. Escalating health care spending on low-value services with a focus on managing disease rather than promoting health is leading to increasing financial toxicity to patients and payment pushback by insurers. In an effort to rein in costs, policymakers are implementing legislation and regulations aimed at curbing spending that have had the unintentional consequences of increasing market consolidations, ultimately creating monopolies and monopsonies that have driven up costs, lowered quality, and ultimately disenfranchises both doctors and patients. The ramifications of such policies have opened the floodgates to the corporatization of medicine. "Speaking to Power With Power: Advocating for Your Profession" explores how physicians can become agents of change in this ever-evolving health care paradigm. This session is geared to exploring the challenges our profession faces and how oncologists can advocate for their patients and profession in their communities, practices, and hospitals both locally and on the state and national arenas. Topics for discussion will include: Leading in your community: explore the challenges facing doctors in their practices and institutions and how they can lead on the local level. Advocating for change: introduction to advocacy tools that can be used on the state and national levels. Negotiating your path to career success: provides tools physicians can use to find common ground when negotiating with key stakeholders. Engaging in payer contracting: how to navigate the ever-changing payer contracting marketplace and leverage value propositions and networks with payers.