The OCMA is dedicated to ensuring our community members have access to medical care and can see a doctor when they need one. Access is essential to boosting prevention, protecting the public health and tackling widespread afflictions early, such as obesity. Access also means making sure a doctor can keep his or her practice economically viable. OCMA works to ensure that payments for physician services by all payors cover a doctor's cost of providing care.
OCMA physicians strongly believe in keeping people healthy by ensuring access to preventive services, including immunizations, heart disease and cancer screenings, while providing them with information to make healthy choices relating to nutrition, exercise and the environment.
The OCMA works closely with the Orange County Health Care Agency and CalOptima, the local Medi-Cal agency, to ensure patients have access to primary, specialty and preventative care through the various, county-wide public health care programs.
As California's population grows rapidly and ages, the demand for physicians' increases as well. Our state is becoming more culturally and ethnically diverse, and many areas that have traditionally been medically underserved are expected to see the greatest population growth.
In the coming years, the CMA and OCMA will step-up efforts to encourage the education and training of more physicians in California, in hopes that they will remain in California to practice and serve patients.
Physicians view the doctor-patient relationship as sacrosanct, the very foundation of health care. This relationship stems from a physician's primary ethical obligation – to place a patient's welfare above their own self-interest and above obligations to other groups, and to advocate for their patient's welfare. OCMA passionately fights on multiple fronts to protect this precious doctrine.
OCMA’s main goals are to advance medicine and improve patient care. Central to this mission is an unflinching dedication to delivering the highest quality care and by demanding rigorous training and education standards for health care professionals.
Physicians and their practices are frequently plagued by payment issues with insurers and public health care programs. CMA, along with OCMA have led successful efforts in the legislative and legal arenas to prevent draconian cuts in the already low Medi-Cal provider reimbursements, which helps doctors keep their practices open to serve Medi-Cal beneficiaries as well as the uninsured.
Under the provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, or the "Stimulus Act"), physicians are eligible for incentives for making the transition to electronic health records (EHRs). OCMA provides services to support physicians during this transition such as educational seminars and webinars about federal rules and regulations and discounts on vetted and approved EHR systems.
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