Berks County Medical Society Medical Record Winter 2017-18 - 23

the past few years, we are faced with the reality of an ever-increasing
landscape of opioid addiction and death. Decreasing both the
number and amount of opioids that we all prescribe; discovering,
promoting and using alternative modalities for treating pain;
lobbying our legislators to secure the necessary sustained funding
to combat this crisis - we need to be relentlessly front and center
in addressing the Opioid Crisis.
The Pennsylvania Medical Society is engaged in many other
issues of utmost importance to physicians and their patients.
While championing team-based health care, we certainly need to
remind those around us that the road to becoming a competent
physician, and taking the best care of patients, requires long
hours of study and years of experiential learning and training.
We need to continue pushing to do away with high stakes,
expensive board recertifying examinations that claim to verify
our continued competence to practice medicine, when no
evidence exists to substantiate this.
We need to advance legislation that streamlines health
insurance company authorization for patients to receive
appropriate medical treatments and medications, and that
streamlines credentialing for qualified physicians to begin
evaluating and treating patients sooner.
We need to legally codify physician orders for life-sustaining
treatment for appropriate patients at the end of their lives, helping
to reduce one of the most significant causes of unsustainable
health care costs.
All these things are important, and these have all been deemed
our "legislative priorities," but, colleagues, the future of medicine is
just around the corner, and we need to be in front of the future.
It begins with a vastly different medical education of our
young physician students and residents, which I know a little
bit about these days. Medical schools like Jefferson are in the
throes of curriculum and didactic changes like those never seen
before. Flipped classrooms, case and problem-based learning,
design thinking and creativity, innovative on-line, just-in-time,
simulation and experiential learning, IBM Watson, virtual care and
teleconferencing are just some of the sweeping concepts, changes
and modalities that are occurring in our academic medical centers
today - helping young students and physicians across new bridges
connecting bioengineering and computational biology to new health
care delivery models, where terms like epigenetics, intergenerational
inheritance, and artificial intelligence are becoming staple concepts.
These are exciting times in medical education, and we must show
our students, residents and young physicians that we understand
them and embrace the way they are now being taught to learn and
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WINTER 2018

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Berks County Medical Society Medical Record Winter 2017-18

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Berks County Medical Society Medical Record Winter 2017-18
