California Medical Association Foundation

The Western Health Care Leadership Academy

The California Medical Association (CMA) created the California Health Care Leadership Academy in 1997 to educate physicians about the rapidly changing health care marketplace and to foster the development of physician leadership in the future evolution of the health care system. In 2014, successfully established as an annual policy and leadership development event and lauded by attendees for its educational programming excellence, the conference was renamed the Western Health Care Leadership Academy and CMA initiated outreach to other western state medical societies to explore possible collaboration in building a larger regional event. An expanded program will extend the Academy’s educational offerings to physicians in other western states where, in most cases, smaller state medical associations lack resources to independently produce comparable programming), and will elevate the profile of the Academy in a way that would strengthen its ability to attract as participants influential players in the health policy arena nationally, especially from the legislative and executive branches of federal government. More importantly, it will elevate the profile of physicians and organized medicine and help define the profession as not just a competing special interest lobby in the public policy arena, but a player fully engaged in shaping the debate agenda and the future of health care.