New Advocacy Ambassadors Program Helps AAFP Members Engage With Their Legislators

The AAFP has launched a new Advocacy Ambassadors program that allows members to easily and meaningfully engage with their federal and state lawmakers on key family medicine issues. This new initiative, which evolved from the Academy’s Key Contacts program, helps family physician advocates broaden their reach and build relationships.

Bolstered by the Academy, Ambassadors will operate across the full spectrum of advocacy, working toward continuous engagement and involvement in shaping health care policy and improving patient outcomes where they work and live. Details, including a form to join the program, are available at https://www.aafp.org/advocacy/ambassadors.html.

The AAFP has outlined its 2025 policy priorities in letters that call for the administration and the 119th Congress to:

• Boost federal investment in primary care by enacting long-term, comprehensive reforms to fee-for-service payment, including Medicare physician payment

• Support promising alternative payment models and continue clearing the path for a transition to value-based payment

• Address the health care consolidation and misaligned incentives that jeopardize patients’ access to primary care

• Reduce family physicians’ administrative burden by reforming utilization management processes and better leveraging the potential of artificial intelligence, among other actions

• Increase and sustain the primary care workforce, with particular focus on robust funding for the Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education Program, the National Health Service Corps, and any other programs that help to recruit, train, and retain primary care physicians

• Promote strong public health by ensuring that all Americans have access to high-quality primary care, including all recommended vaccines for patients of all ages

This work to strengthen family medicine practices and improve community health nationwide is just one pillar of the Academy’s advocacy. Beyond this federal advocacy, the AAFP’s policy portfolio includes state advocacy, chapter advocacy, and private-payer advocacy.

These interwoven efforts are complex, as are the issues at play and the strategies employed to bring about change. But they’re all rooted in a simple aim: amplifying the needs and interests of members and their patients. And the AAFP also has increased the organization’s influence with federal and state policymakers, as well as with public and private payers.

Thanks in large part to the Academy’s leadership over many years, these entities understand that primary care is central to the nation’s health. Adding member voices to this advocacy demonstrates that these efforts are rooted in family physicians’ deep expertise and experience, and in the roots they have put down in their communities.

• © 2025 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.