It was clear from the intense and engaging conversation of the combined specialty and large state society staffs assembled Friday at Heart House that there are various policy opportunities that need to be pursued by the profession. These are the issues that every society felt were compelling and worthy of joint policy consideration before the onslaught of amendment bills and regulations hits us:

• Payment reform: We all believe we should be collaborating on how this occurs, and in the kinds of pilots proposed. We suggest a multi-society workgroup on payment reform, ACOs (accountable care organizations), data standards and quality improvement be formed later this spring.
  
  
• Tort Reform: The ACC shared our ideas and our evolving coalition to secure tort relief for practices and hospitals that achieve “meaningful use” of health IT. There was great enthusiasm for this idea.
  
  
• Registry and Data Collaboration: All societies present felt that we need to stand together on being the purveyors of clinical data and quality and outcomes data. I see a lot of potential additional society collaborations on registries that are possible.
  
  
• Regulatory Collaboration: The health care reform law (PPACA) will create a nightmare of new regulatory challenges -- it already is. We should probably stay out of the proposal to go further in regulating rate increases for insurers. But that is coming. Everybody at this meeting wants to join with the ACC in advocating that CMS should itself develop the newly required alternative sites of care for patients of doctors with in-office imaging. It’s absurd to think that practices could organize prices charged and locations of alternative sites! If they want this to happen (not a bad idea), they should do it!

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