On June 10, Bobby Mukkamala was inaugurated as the 180th president of the American Medical Association (AMA).
An otolaryngologist from Flint, Michigan, Mukkamal chairs the organization’s substance use and pain care task force, won the AMA Foundation’s Excellence in Medicine Leadership Award last June, and served on the AMA board of trustees in 2017 and 2021.
He spoke with Healthcare Brew about how his recent brain tumor diagnosis has informed his leadership at AMA and his plans for the new role.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you want to become president of the AMA? What are your goals?
I have a slightly different answer than before. Up until I became a patient, it was all about my practice of medicine and just the hassles around trying to take good care of patients. Hassles like prior authorization…That hassle factor was something that bothered me, and it bothered my patients.
Now, I’m a patient with something that puts me on death’s door. As far as having a big brain tumor and navigating the system, nobody’s going to have it better than me as far as access to the neurosurgeons that do exactly this kind of operation. That is unique. Inequity exists in our country…As a patient, I experienced the difference between what I have and what everybody else has.
What should people be paying attention to with the AMA?
What I love about the AMA is that when we come up with our policies, it involves every state and every specialty in the country. It’s a room of almost 1,000 doctors who share the stories behind why they want to add something to our policies through a resolution. So when we approve something as a House of Delegates, it’s because it’s important to the majority of physicians in this country.
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Another thing I became very passionate about was I became board certified in lifestyle medicine. The goal of lifestyle medicine is to prevent disease. Working on keeping people healthy and out of the hospital by eating the right things, by sleeping the right amount, by getting the right amount of exercise, by avoiding things like smoking and minimizing alcohol, by being social. The more we focus on prevention of disease—keeping people healthy—the less it’s going to cost us in the long run.
What do you expect will change in the industry in the next five or 10 years?
I predict that things will improve. I think the pendulum from when my parents were in practice and loving it to where we are now, this other end of the pendulum where physicians are just like, “You know what? I don’t want to deal with this anymore.” I predict that in five years, we’ll move a little bit back in that direction.
When we share stories with the people who are in a position to change the direction that we’re going, by things like regulation and who can do what, I’m optimistic we can at least move in the right direction.