Committee on Public Health of the Massachusetts Podiatric Medical Society: A model for podiatric public health at the state level

The future of podiatry to further advance into mainstream medicine and to achieve the goal of parity with allopathic and osteopathic medicine will require a commitment on the part of the podiatric profession to both embrace and engage actively in public health issues. For this initiative to achieve success, work from the bottom up needs to take place and the podiatry leadership at the state level needs to commit support and to drive membership involvement to transform provider behavior that can bring this change into the daily work of podiatric practice. Being actively engaged and partnered with other health and community organizations is necessary to sustain this practice and requires a change in a podiatrist's perception of their own scope of practice and public responsibility. This presentation will review the ease of forming such an entity in the form of a state podiatric public health committee and the use of a state society website to promote public health activities. This change in practice behavior will also be stimulated from the top down as third party payers advance risk contracting and the CMS drives incentives to increase provider revenue though the initiation of more quality and performance measures that involve public health concerns.