President’s Message: Professionalism – Shared Commitments, For A Stronger Future

The American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) supports family physicians who pursue excellence through continuous board certification throughout their career. We commit to supporting Diplomates and our specialty as we serve patients, communities and society.

With the increasing presence of social media, corporatization of medicine, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, physicians can no longer easily rely on age-old medical traditions to navigate an uncertain future. Collectively, family physicians are shouldering the burden of administrative mandates, workforce shortages, the specter of medical misinformation, and the challenge of caring for an aging population with increasingly complex healthcare needs.

What allows us to move forward? It is professionalism that holds what we do together: It is professionalism that drives our desire to keep up to date, to improve our care continuously, to engage constructively in our practice and our community, and it is professionalism that helps us balance the pressures on us and maintain our commitment to service to patients and to our communities.

But what does the term “professionalism” mean? In recent years, especially for some family medicine residents, the term professionalism has been weaponized as some medical schools have emphasized tattoos or piercings as measures of professionalism. ABFM wanted to begin by understanding what practicing family physicians mean when they use the term. In research to be published starting this summer, ABFM Qualitative Scientist Annie Koempel, PhD, underscores that professionalism for family physicians is not about tattoos or piercings, but rather about the doctor-patient relationship and the commitments we make to patients, as refracted through the prisms of our practice, the hospital or health system we work in, and the broader ecology of care and health care policy.

We have also begun to explore what the “Core Values” of our specialty are. Inspired by the example of WONCA, the World Organization of Family Doctors, we have begun to ask the leaders of the national family medicine organizations to prioritize their core values using an instrument developed at Mayo Clinic and used with medical students and faculty in a number of institutions. So far, we have asked the boards of directors of ABFM, Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM), American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians (ACOFP), Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM), as well as a sample of ABFM Diplomates, how they prioritize these core values. What stands out is the strong alignment around core values: personal integrity and honesty, high ethical and moral standards, and a continuing commitment to professional excellence are prioritized across all groups. This shared commitment holds true across organizations, and among Diplomates, board members, the young and old, and women and men. At our core, we share common beliefs.

A related question is: how important is professionalism in the context of everything that is going on in family medicine and health care? Is it foundational to clinical care and education or is it just “nice to have” in a context in which our specialty faces many critical challenges? At a meeting of the leaders of national organizations of family medicine in the summer of 2025, we conducted a formal debate about this proposition. Despite a pre-vote showing only a slight majority of the group in favor of the proposition, by the end, 94% agreed that professionalism was foundational to our work in clinical care and research. The paper based on this discussion will be published later this summer. What we have learned over and over again is that professionalism becomes more important as family physicians talk about it.

ABFM is also bound by the responsibilities of professionalism: we are committed to support Diplomates’ professionalism and service to community. This issue of the Phoenix gives three examples. The 5-Year Cycle can be thought of as a framework for supporting the professional development for family physicians over their careers. Participation in the ABFM Longitudinal Assessment and Lifelong Learning activities support keeping up to date, while the Performance Improvement requirement encourages ongoing improvement of care, and the Guidelines for Professionalism, Licensure, and Personal Conduct, set a standard for ethics for the specialty.  Another feature highlights the ABFM PRIME Registry, a free resource that can help family practices facing CMS MIPS penalties to receive additional reimbursement for work they are already doing. We also regularly celebrate individuals who have contributed to their communities or to the specialty, such as Dr. Marjorie Bowman, who is featured in this issue, and has given 22 years of leadership to the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM) as its editor.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you. Over the upcoming year, we will continue listening and learning about how ABFM can better support Diplomates in their professional commitments. Thank you in advance for your ideas—and for your service to your patients and communities.

Warren Newton, MD, MPH
President and CEO
American Board of Family Medicine