VIVA ACEP16 IN LAS VEGAS! This annual meeting is a great opportunity to spend time networking with our colleagues from all over the United States and around the world. It is a time for outstanding CME, research discovery, and perhaps even more important, it is a time to be reenergized to bring our passion for excellence to our practice.

As your new President, I personally want to encourage you to attend as many Section and Committee meetings as possible so that you can appreciate the breadth and depth of the interests of our members and colleagues from other disciplines. Challenge yourself to learn from as many offerings as possible at ACEP16. The more voices we have, the stronger we will be.

Please also note that I am gratefully accepting the baton of leadership from Immediate Past-President Jay A. Kaplan, MD, FACEP, in a continuous, sustained, multiyear effort on our specialty’s behalf to attain our goals. Jay has done an outstanding job representing us, and I look forward to his continued contributions.

Let me take this opportunity to share with you some of the major initiatives that our College—supported by Committee members, staff, the Board of Directors, and hopefully your assistance—will be working on this year.

• In accordance with the ACEP strategic plan, we want our members to receive great benefits and services that are personalized for their interests and where they are in their careers. We also want to find ways to enhance emergency departmentoperations to ensure long, fulfilling, healthy careers. This includes ways to support emergency physicians moving to and working in relatively underserved areas, such as rural and inner-city sites.
• We continue our issue of years past with the lack of access to mental health resources for psychiatricand drug-dependent patients. We have convened a coalition of specialists and medical societies to investigate programs that have been successful in parts of the country. We will then build upon those models and attempt to promulgate them nationally. We will continue to use our voices and experience to assist the government in drafting opioid and psychiatric regulations.
• In the Affordable Care Act era, it is paramount that ACEP delineates and promotes the incredible value we provide in caring for patients 24-7-365. We need to help drive health care reformin our role as acute care diagnosticians who execute efficient workups with lifesaving, time sensitive interventions in a cost effective manner.
• ACEP is working hard to support you and your practice during the implementation of the Medicare Access and Chip Reauthorization Act (MACRA), otherwise known as the SGR repeal. This legislation creates bonus programs for physicians related to the quality of care we deliver. As the acute care specialists, emergency physicians are well positioned to create a better practice for ourselves with this new law. Through ACEP’s clinical registry CEDR, and the Alternative Payment Models the ACEP task force designed, ACEP is working hard to get you the infrastructure you will need as MACRA is implemented in 2017.
• ACEP will be continuing the battle against dishonest billing practices that harm our patients, as well as our fellow emergency medicine practitioners. In May, the Board of Directors moved to sue the federal government over the unclear and easily abused language of the “greatest-of-three” rule, after lengthy discussions and guidance with federal officials led nowhere. I look forward to advocating on your behalf, as well as for Fair Coverage on behalf of our patients. ACEP will continue working with our Government Affairs Office and our Reimbursement Committee experts to have a reasonable and logical resolution to the confusing and inconsistent regulations created by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services regarding the two-midnight rule, the three-day-stay rule, and observation versus admission status. See our FairCoverage.org campaign for more details.
• Last but not least, we must increase diversity and inclusion and cultural sensitivity in our organization, among our membership and other practitioners of emergency medicine, and for our patients. Having physicians, advanced practice practitioners, nurses, and other staff with wide and varied backgrounds of gender, generation, race, religion, and LGBTQ groups (among many other factors) will increase the quality of care we are able to provide for our patients and the breadth of knowledge we are able to share among ourselves. It will help our efforts to reduce health disparities. I look forward to continuing discussions about how we can encourage diversity and inclusion in ACEP, our workplaces, and our clinical practices.

Enjoy your time at ACEP16. I look forward to serving you.

Dr. Parker is president of ACEP; an attending emergency physician with West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois; senior vice president of Envision Healthcare; and president of Team Parker LLC, a consulting group. Dr. Parker is also a clinical assistant professor at the Texas Tech El Paso department of emergency medicine.