News from ACOI

The ACOI has updated its Advocacy Agenda, which will guide all advocacy legislative and regulatory efforts over the next two years. The new agenda will reflect the results of an ACOI member survey conducted earlier this year, as well as the input of the ACOI Government Affairs Committee.

Student Doctor Obi was nominated because he embodies the core values of osteopathic medicine through his commitment to holistic patient care, lifelong learning, and a passion for internal medicine. His dedication to treating the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—is evident in both his academic pursuits and patient interactions.

Share your research with the ACOI community through the Poster Contests and Faculty Poster Abstracts. Highlight new discoveries, illuminating case studies, or fascinating knowledge from the past year that serves and inspires others.

Demonstrate your leadership and present your work at ACOI 2025! We are now seeking session proposals for the Annual Convention. Do you have inspiring and innovative insights from this past year? Submit your work and share your findings with your colleagues at ACOI 2025.

The ACOI 2025 Spring Meetings are now available on-demand, offering ACOI members a virtual event rich with innovative courses and highly relevant lectures. Across two courses – the Internal Medicine Comprehensive Update and the Clinical Challenges in Hospital Medicine – the Spring Meetings offered a knowledge refresh that covered a diverse range of osteopathic internal medicine and subspecialty topics.

In medicine, it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day routine and lose sight of our higher purposes. So many of us got into medicine, our calling, in order to help people. But who helps us when we lose our way? The answer lies in rediscovering how the mind, body, and spirit are interconnected. If one of these areas becomes dysregulated, it can affect the other two. If we can devote time to healing one of these areas, it can likewise affect the other two and allow us to find ourselves and our true passions again.

ACOI active members who are interested in serving on the Board of Directors are invited to complete the nomination form.

Nominations are still open for the ACOI Fellowship, Master Fellowship, Memorial Awards, and Annual Awards. If you have been considering showing your support for a fellow member, or applying to the Conclave of Fellows, now is the time! The deadline for all nominations is May 31, 2025.

Last fall, ACOI introduced two memorial awards, both geared toward recognizing osteopathic internal medicine residents. The David Susser Memorial Award, notably, was given to two honorees. One of those recipients, Lucia Schroeder, DO, MPH, is a resident with an impressive resumé, including a broad range of engagement through volunteer service and education in addition to her work at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, California.

April 22, 2025, marks the 55th year of Earth Day, a movement that started as a protest against pollution and has grown into a monumental global demand to fight climate change and environmental decline.  

Almost fifteen years ago, the first reports of an unusual form of chronic kidney disease (CKD) emerged from the lowlands of Central America.(1,2) A tiny band of astute internists practicing in rural clinics in Nicaragua and El Salvador noticed over a period of years an epidemic-scale increase in the prevalence of CKD among the agricultural workers in their communities. The condition was both irreversible and progressive in a region poorly able to support the needs of the growing numbers of people with End-Stage Kidney Disease (ESKD).

The 2025 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) Final Rule released a new complexity add-on HCPCS code. Although this code has similarities to the G2211 complexity add on code, it has significant restrictions on who can submit claims for its use. The new code, G0545, is a code that is for use by “a physician with specialized training in infectious diseases.”