Annual conference will be ‘a hoot and a half’ says AAPA president
by Shannon Firth
Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today May 12, 2017

LAS VEGAS — Recertification battles, the future of practice authority, and stamping out the opioid crisis will be core issues for discussion at the American Academy of PAs conference here next week.
The leading organization for physician assistants will celebrate 50 years of the profession at its annual conference, where the theme is “Beyond.”
The first ever class of PAs graduated on Oct. 6, 1967, said Josanne Pagel, MPAS, PA-C, president and chair of the board of directors for the AAPA and executive director of Physician Assistant Services at the Cleveland Clinic.
While remembering their half-century of history, PAs will also look ahead to the next 50 years, to ways they can transform healthcare “beyond their wildest dreams, Pagel said in a phone interview, during which a press representative was present.
One of the buzz words at this year’s conference will be “optimal team practice.”
A resolution on the future of practice authority will be debated and voted on during the AAPA’s House of Delegates meeting.
“We know going into the future, [medicine] is all about team care,” Pagel said. “So, we really emphasize our commitment to that.”
While committed to working with physicians, optimal team practice also means rejecting laws and regulations that require PAs to have or report a supervisory agreement with a physician in order to practice, she said, and lobbying for autonomous state boards — voting bodies with a majority of PAs.
“We want to make sure that the PAs have a voice in their governance to license, to regulate and to discipline PAs,” Pagel said.
The AAPA also wants to ensure PAs are eligible for direct reimbursement from insurers instead of remaining “hidden providers” under a physician’s schedule.
The resolution amends AAPA’s Guidelines for State Regulation of PAs to let individual states decide which provisions work for them.
Continuing medical education sessions will begin on Monday morning, with poster sessions and a special open forum on the future of PA recertification that afternoon, a subject on which the AAPA is currently battling with the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA).
The latter recently announced that it was exploring alternative models for maintenance of certification — an idea Pagel applauds — but the NCCPA continues to lobby to make recertification a condition for maintaining licensure in at least three states: Illinois, West Virginia, and New Mexico.
NCCPAs’s lobbying efforts, and its push for continual recertification via “high stakes exams” are “jeopardizing the ability of PAs to practice,” she said.
The Monday forum will explore the feasibility of establishing a new certifying body, and later the AAPA’s House of Delegates will take up a resolution addressing the NCCPA’s lobbying efforts.
The conference has devoted several sessions to the opioid abuse epidemic including presentations on appropriate opioid prescribing and non-opioid pain management.
Pagel, as someone whose family has been personally affected by the epidemic and whose home state of Ohio is at the “top of the charts” in terms of opioid deaths, sees these presentations as very important.
“The PAs are jumping on this to be able to lead and show other professions how to be responsible prescribers.”
The meeting will also include several sessions on leveraging data and new technologies.
More than 6,500 attendees are expected at the conference and 99 poster presentations.
AAPA will host a special champagne toast to commemorate 50 years of the PA profession with a live performance from the Texas Tenors on Monday evening.
Other conference highlights include the AAPA’s National Medical Challenge Bowl on Wednesday and keynote speaker Zubin Damania, MD — a.k.a “ZDoggMD” — who will illustrate the comic side of medicine on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s going to be … a hoot and a half,” Pagel said.