As candidate for President a few years ago, we asked about the emergency physician workforce. Now that you are the President, how will you ensure that business interests do not supersede patient care and that the needs of patients and emergency physicians take priority?

Dr. Kang: I think you’ve seen that manifested, both as what most of the candidates have said over the past several years, but also in the messaging that we’ve seen from the College. With recent events this past summer, the patient-physician relationship, that is, the relationship with our patients at the bedside always comes foremost. One of the things that we’ve heard from many members is concern that somewhere along the way, business interests, whether it’s on the individual, on the local, or on the macro level, may impede that relationship or interfere with it. The physician-patient relationship must continue to be sacrosanct.

Second, we need to have discussions when and where we believe that there is a direct impact on our ability to establish rapport, evaluate, treat, and disposition our patients at the bedside. That migrates into many other issues, whether it’s actual clinical decisions, business decisions, and staffing decisions. As long as we remember what our primary mission is as an organization and remember the patient physician relationship we’ll continue to mitigate those effects.

How do you plan on challenging the monopolization of health care services?

Dr. Kang: I think there are two reasons monopolization becomes a concern. One of them is we have seen consolidation in every aspect of health care as economies of scale, as people try to find better ways and sometimes cheaper ways of doing things. And we’ve seen that not just with employers, but also with entire health care systems, and even sometimes some of our physician groups. First and foremost, we must recognize those direct as well as potentially insidious effects of this trend.

The second one is vertical integration among a lot of health care organizations and, in particular, insurers. Although I’m still learning about it and talking with some of our experts, some insurers now actually serve as their own complete health care networks. How does that impact patient care but also our practices and our careers over time? And so I want to make sure that we continue to take a look at both of those, because they are among the challenges right now to the current well-being of our physician community as well as career satisfaction.