Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, an infectious disease specialist from Lexington, Ky., was sworn in Tuesday at the American Medical Association House of Delegates meeting in Chicago as the AMA's 168th president.
In her inaugural speech, Hoven urged the AMA to avoid a path of inaction that glorifies the past and thwarts forward motion. Instead, she asked them to choose the path of collaboration and innovation and to lead the drive toward productive change.
Hoven made note of her specialty and how it has shaped her career as a physician and her participation in organized medicine.
“When you tell people you're an infectious disease doctor, you get a lot of reactions,” she said. “Some greet you with a look of curiosity—mingled with thinly veiled anxiety. When you go to shake their hand, they offer you an elbow.”
Hoven told of starting her career at the Lexington Clinic in the late '70s treating patients with tuberculosis, Legionnaires' disease, and then seeing more and more young men coming in with a disease that killed them in months and sometimes weeks. She recalled how these original AIDS patients first fell ill, then felt the fear of being “outed” as gay, then lost their jobs and then, “just when they needed health insurance the most,” they lost their health insurance.
“My AIDS patients and their family members taught me about strength, about courage and about never, ever passing judgment about something you do not understand,” Hoven said. She added how proposed legislation that would have allowed discrimination against AIDS patients led her to get involved with the Kentucky Medical Association, an organization she became president of in 1993.
“I saw how an issue I faced in my exam room could be taken to a higher level,” Hoven said. “And, if resolved at that higher level, the benefits would reach not only my own patients, but every patient in the state of Kentucky.”
She later told of seeing a 6-year-old boy whose mother died of AIDS in 1991. The boy tested HIV-positive, but is doing fine 22 years later, has never been hospitalized and is working on the family farm.
Hoven also told of visiting a Toyota automobile manufacturing plant in Kentucky and watching steel coils being shaped into cars under a system where people are shown respect and there is a culture of striving for continuous improvement. If physicians adopted this same system and culture, she said they could drive meaningful medical malpractice reform, stop formation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board and repeal the Medicare sustainable-growth rate physician-payment formula.
“Physicians can shape the healthcare system this country needs,” Hoven said.
Follow Andis Robeznieks on Twitter: @MHARobeznieks
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