ACC was at the table and being heard in multiple venues last week. A few include: 

• The P4P Conference: ACC Board VP Ralph Brindis and I were keynoters at the Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) P4P Conference in San Francisco. It’s a big meeting with all of the players we need to partner with on IC3 and Quality First. We talked about aligning payment, accountability and opportunity in cardiology, with Ralph bringing his expansive knowledge of our NCDR registries to the discussion. This was a great opportunity to underscore our commitment to professionalism and my — perhaps overly optimistic — view that putting our patients’ interests first will be powerfully in our best interest as well (to protect the viability of struggling practices). We had more requests to partner on the registries than we could attempt to meet with soon. But we ARE getting our message out.
• AMA National Advocacy Conference: ACC President Doug Weaver and President-elect Fred Bove ably represented us at this meeting. Doug and AMA President Nancy Nielson, among the few true physician reps at the WH Summit were in demand to share their views on what is happening. We also had side meetings with state society executives on our reform ideas.
• The National Lieutenant Governors’ Association: I keynoted the NLGA dinner of the 50 state LGs in DC on cardiovascular disease, its huge impacts on state Medicaid and state employee costs, and on opportunities to partner on lowering costs and improving quality. Many of these folks will later become Governors, so this was time well spent.
• Tribute to Louise Liang MD: ACC held an invitational program and reception for 75 DC quality leaders and staff celebrating the outstanding career of Louise Liang MD, information technology and EHR and PHR innovator for Kaiser Permanente nationally, board members of IHI, NCQA, and NQF, and former leader in Group Health of Washington State, Harvard, and Hawaii. Louise is retiring, and says she will play golf mostly for the next few years. George Halverson, CEO of KP commented on that, saying, “look for golf to change.” In the crowd were some notables besides Dr. Weaver, Bove, and Brindis. We were able to have great side meetings with Drs.Carolyn Clancy (Director of AHRQ), and Mike McGinnis (IOM Comparative Effectiveness guru, and long-standing US Preventive Services Task Force Chair).