Dr. Dark: What’s one of the most important things that you’ve done while you’ve been in office?

Dr. Shah: The first thing that comes to mind are bills that started with a constituent idea and then it ended up getting signed in the law. A guy who came to me whose son had muscular dystrophy. He was going to the doctor and getting that doctor’s prior authorization forms and filling them out because the doctor’s staff was so backed up that they couldn’t fill them out on time and his son was suffering for lack of care. So I said, this has to be streamlined.

I sponsored a bill to streamline the prior authorization process, simplify it so that it’s a single two-page form standardized across the entire state. I created a win for patients, a win for physicians, and even the insurance companies because it reduced a lot of their cost on the backend.

Another one specifically for emergency medicine is the non-retaliation bill, which ACEP eventually took as a national resolution and pushed it out to the 50 state houses. It started with an emergency physician who was working and he saw a non-medical person monitoring the telemonitors, which is not really monitoring, is it? He did the appropriate thing by relaying his concern and he was taken off the schedule, presumably in retaliation. But Arizona law did not account for that particular circumstance because he wasn’t employed by the hospital. The whistleblower law at the time said that the hospital or employer couldn’t terminate you, but it didn’t say anything about third parties. We had this updated to include third parties.

The third bill, violence against health care providers, partnered up with the nurses who are our chief sponsors on this. But it absolutely affects emergency physicians because I’ve been assaulted in the ER, as most of my ER colleagues have been. We made a major push and I was able to get that again signed into law. It was in another lawmaker’s name, but it was important to get that done and I’m thankful to ACEP Now for featuring it a couple years ago.

Dr. Dark: You want to make your next career move a DC move. What do you want to get accomplished at the federal level?

Dr. Shah: A lot of what happens in health care overall is decided at the federal level. We have patients that are out there that have no coverage. That is a problem. As we all know, we end up doing a lot of primary care in the emergency department. We end up seeing a lot of patients that cannot pay. Those patients don’t necessarily have the best outcomes. The cost of care is extraordinarily high. There is an efficiency problem here too, where we are spending twice as much per capita as many other countries and not getting the outcomes and not covering everybody, so something’s got to give.