Developing Leadership in a Time of Transformation.

The recently released National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report counts development of strong and coordinated primary care leadership among the 7 critical facilitators required for the United States to succeed in Implementing High-Quality Primary Care.1 The results of many decades of neglecting primary care as the foundation of an effective health system are manifest as rapid gains in health outcomes over the past century begin to recede despite mounting investment, population health outcomes lag all other comparable developed countries,2 and life expectancy drops3 for the first time in American history. The COVID pandemic and a racial reckoning have compounded this problem and reacquainted us with our history of unequal care4 and shameful disparities. To meet the challenge of our times, the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) believes that personal doctors will need to play a large part in leading the reform and reorganization of health care, community by community, state by state, and health system by health system. With over 100,000 Diplomates, family physicians are not the only tribe of personal physicians, but they are the largest and most widely distributed.5 If personal physicians are going to play a role in shaping the future of health care, family physicians must play a role. And this critical need for leadership from the specialty of family medicine extends across the continuum of health care, from main street to the C suite to the dean’s suite to Wall Street. This editorial describes the ABFM’s current support and future leadership development programs, in the context of the specialty’s overall portfolio of leadership development programs.