Back to Table of Contents | April 2011

MMA News

MMA Seeks Officer Candidates

The MMA is seeking nominations for officers. As a member, you are invited to nominate a colleague or yourself for the offices of president-elect, secretary-treasurer, speaker of the House, and vice speaker of the House, or to serve as an American Medical Association (AMA) delegate or alternate. The AMA delegation represents Minnesota physicians during AMA deliberations.

The MMA Nominating and Leadership Development Committee will provide a slate of candidates to the 2011 House of Delegates. The election will be held in September during the MMA Annual Meeting in Duluth.

The president-elect serves as a backup to the president and is inaugurated as president the following year. The secretary- treasurer manages the financial affairs of the association and chairs the Committee on Administration and Finance. The speaker presides over House of Delegates meetings and is assisted by the vice speaker.

If you are interested in being considered for an office or if you would like to recommend a colleague, please contact Shari Nelson at snelson@mnmed.org. The deadline for nominations is May 10.

New Handbook for M.D.s Advising Community Health Boards

The MMA, in conjunction with the Minnesota Department of Health, has created a handbook for physicians who act as medical consultants for the state’s community health boards.

Medical consultants are tasked with providing appropriate medical advice and direction for local boards of health and assisting those boards in coordinating the delivery of community health services. Their crucial and varied duties include emergency preparedness, the review of standing orders and medical policies at the county level, and the provision of patient care. In the interest of bridging the gap between medicine and public health, the MMA worked with the Department of Health for more than a year to explore ways to support the state’s medical consultants. The handbook, which was one of the outcomes of that effort, is available at www.mnmed.org/medicalconsultant.

Meet a Member: Will Nicholson, M.D.

Will Nicholson M.D., a family physician at St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood, sees a connection between patient care and policy. “I’m a family doctor, and I treat a wide variety of undifferentiated illnesses, which really gives you perspective about the importance of looking upstream towards prevention to solve problems,” he says. Because Nicholson believes strongly that physicians need to share their perspectives with those who make health policy, he joined MEDPAC, the MMA’s political arm. He currently serves as its secretary/treasurer.

Involvement in MEDPAC is just the latest manifestation of Nicholson’s interest in politics and health policy. While attending the University of Minnesota Medical School, he became interested in learning more about the 2004 presidential candidates’ positions on health care. He spent the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses attending rallies and interviewing most of the candidates, including the eventual Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry. “I was sick of listening to their sound bites, and I wanted to know more, and I got great access to the candidates and learned a lot,” he says. He was disappointed, however, that neither the candidates nor the press were paying much attention to the issue of health care during that campaign, which was dominated by concern over countering terrorism and the Iraq War.

To raise the profile of health care during the campaign, Nicholson took nearly a semester off of medical school to work to get physicians in Minnesota more involved in shaping the health care debate. He approached both parties but ended up working with the DFL and independently formed the group Doctors for Kerry, which organized more than 300 doctors in Minnesota who supported Kerry’s health care reform plan.

That experience taught him that doctors need to have sustained, long-term involvement in politics in order to influence public policy and make changes that will benefit patients. He says being a part of MEDPAC and the MMA allows him to have that kind of involvement.

He also sees his work with MEDPAC as an opportunity to find common ground with colleagues who may disagree with him. “I still have more in common with them than anyone else in politics because we both share the vow to take care of patients and do no harm,” he explains.

Nicholson has been impressed with the way MEDPAC’s members transcend party lines and choose to support candidates who best align with medicine rather than their personal political views.

One of Nicholson’s interests is reforming the health insurance market. After completing his residency in 2009, he decided to drop his employer’s health insurance and enter the consumer market to better understand what his patients go through to get health insurance. Nicholson spent a year researching policies. He was interviewed by reporters from CNN and other media outlets about his decision to do this, and he started a blog, www.triagepolitics.com, about it. Nicholson now uses his blog to share his musings on a variety of topics ranging from health care reform to electronic medical records.

As for his insurance status, he is back on his employer-sponsored plan and is writing up the results of his experiment. “I’m trying hard to offer constructive suggestions and not just another laundry list of complaints about the health insurance industry,” he says.

MAPS Develops Model Informed-Consent Policy

The Minnesota Alliance for Patient Safety (MAPS), a group of organizations that includes the MMA, has developed a model policy that health care facilities can use to improve their informed consent process for surgeries and invasive procedures. The model policy complies with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) conditions of participation for surgery and invasive procedures, which is required by providers who receive Medicare payments.

The MMA took the lead in developing the model policy after hospitals indicated that they were struggling to meet the CMS requirements. In 2004, CMS began requiring health care providers to have informed consent policies that foster shared decision-making and are patient-centered and sensitive to health literacy concerns. In 2007, MAPS members developed a model informed consent form written at a fourth-grade reading level that could be used by providers in Minnesota.

However, some facilities said they were still struggling. Rebecca Schierman, MMA manager of quality improvement, pulled together a 15-member work group composed of representatives from hospitals, clinics, and large health care systems to address questions such as Who on the care team was responsible for getting informed consent? Who could authorize informed consent if the patient could not? And what procedures required informed consent?

“We hope the MAPS model policy will send a clear message to all health care providers about their ethical and legal responsibilities in obtaining meaningful informed consent. Informed consent must be patient-centered and allow patients to participate in medical decisions,” says Robert Meiches, M.D., chief executive officer of the MMA.

To download the new Model Policy for Informed Consent for Surgical and Invasive Procedures, go to www.mnpatientsafety.org. Also available on this site are model consent forms for Prospective Payment System Hospitals and Clinics and Critical Access Hospitals.