Medical student activities

Friday, November 01, 2013 12:35 PM

Student members gather for networking, policymaking

CMS Medical Student Component Society

The medical students had a large presence at the 2013 Annual Meeting with more than 80 student members in attendance. Students from the two Colorado medical schools have joined forces to form the CMS Medical Student Component Society. They caucused Saturday morning on the resolutions and reports before the House of Delegates, presented the section’s work to the House of Delegates Saturday afternoon and held a focus group with CMS members on underserved specialty care access.

“We’re approaching policy with great interest – knowing that this organization will have a large part in shaping our future practice conditions – and also with great humility and the attitude that we are here to learn from those who have been out practicing and setting policy,” said Amy Beeson, a medical student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine (UCSOM).

Six students presented to the House of Delegates: Beeson, Bianca Pullen and Warren Pettine from UCSOM, and Julia Tanguay, Susan Bauer, and Brendan Fowler from Rocky Vista University (RVU).

Beeson explained that the UCSOM representatives polled their student body to determine their top five priorities: medical student tuition and loan forgiveness, health access and services for mental illness, medical malpractice laws, single-payer health care in Colorado, and physician pay.

From this poll, they chose to focus first on improving mental health care in Colorado. “The big initiative right now has to do with integrating physical and behavioral health care,” Pettine said. “This means that you have your primary care provider and mental health provider working side by side in the same facility, participating in the same patient visit. We [in Colorado] are at the center of where this is happening.”

There are many issues with integrating physical and behavioral health care, but the improved outcomes and improved allocation of health care resources could greatly benefit the state, Pettine noted. Colorado is working toward solutions by crafting the State Innovation Model (SIM), a federal grant proposal on this issue, and through the work of Colorado Sen. John Kafalas, who is exploring initiatives to facilitate integration.

The students’ second goal is to reduce debt-driven residency choices. Studies have shown that the level of a student’s educational debt can discourage that person from pursuing a primary care specialty. And with an estimated 510,000 new insured patients entering the system between 2014 and 2016, the demand for primary care physicians will only rise. Pullen explained that CU has the fourth lowest level of state support and the 8th highest level of tuition for residents with regard to state funding for medical education. She urged CMS to advocate for increased funding for medical education.

Tanguay said that increased funding of RVU could support the primary care workforce; 58 percent of the 2012 and 2013 RVU graduates pursued primary care residencies. They see that graduate medical education funding has largely fallen on the federal government, and Colorado must be innovative in finding additional avenues for funding, she said.

Sunday morning the students held a breakout session with CMS members on access to specialty care. Lynn Parry, MD, a CMS past president, said the session made her realize that advocates for better access have been asking the wrong questions. “What we’ve been asking is whether specialists take Medicaid or Medicare but we haven’t asked whether they would do it with a different model.”

Beeson said the diverse group of physicians “eagerly shared their ideas on how to improve access across the board, using creative and collaborative solutions such as technology, patient navigators, changing reimbursement, and recruiting physician volunteers.”