Annual Meeting: Perspectives

He was early. No one besides the audiovisual guy was there. It was a big room with several hundred uncomfortable chairs, all too close together. He chose one on the aisle about halfway back. The temperature was just a little too chilly. As he sat down, he sighed with relief.

He was a general internist in a town with one red light. Getting here had been frustrating. First, he'd spent the last 2 weeks working extra hard, trying to keep his chronically ill patients doing as well as they could, out of the hospital. The last week had been a blur of activity, attempting to get his census of inpatients down. Then there had been the inevitable last-minute crises: chest pain, fever, a dead leg. It was never a tidy process.

His wife was upset because of the extra-long days and because he'd been …