Your Feedback Makes Us Better

Oct. 27, 2022

By Shawn Martin
AAFP Executive Vice President and CEO

The Family Medicine Experience (FMX), our largest annual conference, brought many members together in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the best medical specialty — family medicine!

Anyone who attended will tell you: the benefits stretched beyond valuable CME and inspiring Main Stage events to something intangible, your ability to reconnect with your colleagues and the AAFP to talk about challenges and opportunities only family physicians can truly understand. I hope you’ll make plans to join us in Chicago next year!

For me, FMX was a golden opportunity to hear firsthand what you need from your Academy and to see your connection to this organization and to each other. As I said from the stage, member satisfaction drives everything we do.

2022 Member Satisfaction Survey

That’s why we ask you to answer key questions every year. My sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to give invaluable feedback this year. Of course, it’s gratifying to hear about the AAFP’s successes that help you keep you, your patients and your communities healthy and thriving. But, for me personally, I am more focused on where we need to work harder to meet your needs as a family physician.

In this year’s survey, active and resident members identified what we can do to best support each of you and elevate the specialty of family medicine.

On Track … With Room to Grow

It was good to see that while there’s room for improvement in certain areas, you say we’re on the right track overall. Over 80% of respondents said membership in the AAFP is important, and three-fourths are satisfied or very satisfied with AAFP membership.

The AAFP staff is continuously working to improve the value of membership, and your feedback validated that the priorities established by the Board are where you need and want your Academy to focus.

You can learn more about our strategic plan and hear from AAFP leaders about work we’re doing on your behalf.

Enabling Your Success

I do want to highlight a few areas that we know are especially important to many of you:

• Administrative simplification: We know you spend way more time than you want on paperwork and other administrative tasks. The AAFP has an intense focus on driving administrative simplification so you can spend more time with your patients and less tied up by busywork. Success here is so crucial that we have dedicated a resource team to harness the power of the AAFP to equip you with tools to navigate administrative tasks, and we will continue a full-court press on our advocacy efforts aimed at reducing administrative burden.
• Innovation in payment: No single strategic objective is more important to building a primary care-centric health care system than payment reform. The value of primary care to individuals and our health care system has never enjoyed broader recognition and support, but it has also never been at greater risk. This is primarily due to a failed financing model. To truly achieve the full benefits of primary care, we must support a more comprehensive, longitudinal, multimodal, and proactive style of primary care versus the reactive, episodic, sick-focused, fee-for-service system that exists today. The AAFP is working hard to identify and implement payment policies that recognize your value, promote comprehensive and continuous care, and allow you to focus on your patients rather than the onerous activities associated with fee-for-service payments.
• Fighting for family medicine with powerful advocacy: The AAFP lobbies hard on your behalf to get policies passed that are favorable to family medicine. While we have quite a few wins in this area, there is still work to be done, so we aren’t letting off the gas. I encourage you to consider lending your voice to the fight as well with our Speak Outs.
• Diversity, equity and inclusion: Promoting diversity, equity and inclusion across the AAFP, within the specialty of family medicine, and for patients is critical to ensuring vibrant, healthy communities. Thus, the AAFP is integrating DEI throughout our strategic plan, and the newly formed Commission on DEI in Family Medicine will help inform and guide this work.