An End-of-Year Message of Gratitude and Progress
From WSMA CEO Jennifer Hanscom
As 2025 draws to a close, I wanted to express my deepest appreciation to you, our members, for your support, engagement, and unwavering commitment to medicine and to your WSMA.
Going into my 13th year as WSMA’s CEO, it remains an extraordinary privilege to serve Washington state’s physician community. Over the past decade, health care has evolved in increasingly complex and unpredictable ways. While that reality brought challenges, it also reinforced why WSMA’s mission, and your collective voice, matter more than ever.
Thanks to your engagement, the leadership of our physician volunteers, and the dedication of our professional staff, WSMA’s membership grew by 3.5% in 2025. Our membership retention remained strong at 90%, and we welcomed 856 brand-new members, exceeding our yearly goal. These numbers represent something far more important than metrics: They reflect a growing, engaged physician community committed to advocacy and leadership.
In 2025, WSMA’s advocacy was proactive, strategic, and effective. Together, we protected patients, physicians, and science-based medicine by:
- Successfully suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to restore deleted taxpayer-funded public health data impacting marginalized communities.
- Combating incorrect or misleading medical information.
- Ensuring timely licensure approvals for newly hired physicians and staff.
- Defeating all unsafe scope-of-practice legislation.
- Securing confidentiality protections for physician and physician assistant well-being programs.
- Preserving science-guided public health and vaccine communications.
- Passing the Medicaid Access Program to pursue future reimbursement increases.
- Advancing federal advocacy around Medicaid cuts, much-needed Medicare payment reform, prior authorization modernization, and opposing harmful federal proposals.
By the numbers, your engagement helped drive action on more than 400 bills impacting the profession and patients, generated more than 3,000 messages to legislators, filled a sold-out Legislative Summit, supported nine statewide road-trip events, and informed 72 state and federal rulemakings.
Beyond the Legislature, your WSMA actively champions science, evidence-based medicine, and affordable patient care, and you, our members, are central to that work. In 2025 alone, the WSMA and physician voices were featured in more than 700 local, state, and national media mentions, shaping public understanding and influencing key conversations. We amplify these efforts across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and provide ready-to-use social media toolkits so you can easily add your voice and extend our reach. By engaging with WSMA’s advocacy and communications efforts, you help build trust with patients, strengthen the physician voice, and advance the care our communities depend on.
We also made important investments in the future of medicine and public health. We secured more than $300,000 for our WSMA Better Prescribing, Better Treatment Program, a $150,000 two-year grant to address social drivers of health, and a $45,000 AMA Scope of Practice Partnership grant for 2026. Additionally, the WSMA Foundation will begin awarding its first $40,000 annual scholarship for a medical student in 2026 to increase representation in medicine, an exciting milestone made possible by your generosity.
None of these accomplishments belong to any one individual. They reflect the collective strength of WSMA’s members, physician leaders, and staff working together on behalf of patients and the profession.
Thank you for your membership, your advocacy, and your belief in the power of organized medicine. As we look ahead to 2026, I am deeply optimistic about what we will continue to accomplish together.