With research funding cuts, Medicare/Medicaid changes and myriad insurance-payment battles, the rheumatology profession has taken a lot of hits of late. That means the ACR and its members need to “double-down on our principles” to address those challenges, according to incoming ACR President William (Will) F. Harvey, MD, MSc, FACR, associate professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston. With strategies already in mind, he is eager to get his 2025–26 term started.
Dr. Will Harvey
Dr. Harvey has been a practicing rheumatologist at Tufts since 2008, and currently serves as the interim chief of rheumatology at Tufts Medical Center, as well as deputy chief information officer for the Tufts’ health system, which entails overseeing its medical record system. He is also a researcher with an interest in epidemiology and clinical trial design.
He has held numerous volunteer positions with the ACR, including fellow-in-training member on the Government Affairs Committee (GAC), Young Board Member on the ACR Board of Directors, GAC chair for three years, member of the ACR Board of Directors and chair of the Registries & Health Information Technology (RHIT) Committee. In 2002, he accepted a two-year term as secretary of the ACR, followed by a year post as president elect, and he is now moving into his post as ACR president.
In an interview with The Rheumatologist (TR), Dr. Harvey explained why he remains so committed to, and optimistic about, the field, and how the ACR and its members can and must move forward despite today’s strong headwinds.
TR: Your new role as president will be a bit of a shift in your engagement with the ACR. Before we talk about your upcoming role as president, would you highlight an area that has particularly drawn you as an ACR volunteer in the past?
Dr. Harvey: Advocacy is at the top of the list. There have continued to be a lot of major advances involving the way in which physicians, and rheumatologists specifically, are reimbursed, notably the rules with which we have to interact with insurance companies and how they are able—or not able—to help us effectively treat our patients. The ACR has advocated for both patients and rheumatologists to the government, insurance companies and health systems. That advocacy work is a really important part of what the College does and it is where my interest has centered … and still lies.
TR: Describe the importance of advocacy today.
Dr. Harvey: Unquestionably, we are in a time where our profession is under assault from a lot of different directions. We have often seen times in the past where research funding has been threatened, reimbursement for certain services has been threatened or new challenges have arisen with Medicaid or Medicare or other things, but I think for the first time in a while, we are now seeing all of those things becoming problematic at the same time. As such, we have to double-down on our principles and not only educate ourselves, but also educate lawmakers, other public officials, research institutes and so forth to make sure that the core of our specialty doesn’t die while all this stuff is happening around us.
TR: How do you do that in today’s political climate and everything that goes with it?
Dr. Harvey: It’s a good question; it’s one I get a lot. I think the answer is to go about our advocacy by being ruthlessly apolitical. I choose that phrase specifically, because even within our membership, there are people who have strongly held political beliefs on both ends of the spectrum, and these are political beliefs that go well beyond the issues affecting rheumatology. But as we think about doing this work on behalf of the specialty, we have to be relentlessly focused on the actually nonpartisan issues that are affecting our patients. Rheumatic diseases don’t know what political affiliation you have when they afflict you, and neither do a patient’s political views determine the cost of medications or impact their ability to access them.
We have to focus on finding bipartisan solutions. When you take the time to get to the root of the issue, all Americans want high-quality healthcare and new medical discoveries. And while we may sometimes agree to disagree about the best way to get there, if we stay focused on what truly matters, then we can still make progress. Certainly, advocacy will be a major focus in the coming year.
TR: You are coming in as the president of the ACR in a time of uncertainty. What are you seeing as particular issues?
Dr. Harvey: The biggest challenge right now is fighting the overall sense of futility. If researchers are questioning their ability to continue to do research, and if clinicians are questioning their ability to effectively care for patients, that is an existential threat to any medical specialty. And it is an even keener threat to a small specialty like ours, which was already facing a workforce shortage prior to all of the things that are happening in the world right now. And so, it may sound trite, but we need that message of hope, so people feel self-efficacy. By that, I mean that we—especially through the College—can do something to get back whatever we think has been lost or is being lost.
When the chips are down, we have to return to basics. And the basics are that we have a specialty that’s thriving, professionals who are feeling like they love their job and their work, and newcomers who continue to be drawn to the profession. With that strong foundation, we’ll be able to weather these, hopefully, relatively short-term storms going forward.
TR: What else would you like to emphasize as ACR president?
Dr. Harvey: I’m also very interested in member engagement. That’s especially important now, when our country—our world—outside rheumatology feels divided and tense. People are looking for a place where they can find others with whom they feel familiar and can have a conversation about things of mutual interest to them, and leave feeling as though they can still do something good in the world.
In this tumultuous time, it’s important for the College and our state rheumatology societies to be those spaces for rheumatologists and other health professionals where we can find comfort, happiness, joy, fulfillment—whatever you want to call it.
TR: How do you do that during your term as president?
Dr. Harvey: We need to continue to grow the opportunities to get together at meetings, such as ACR Convergence, the ACR’s State-of-the Art Clinical Symposium (SOTA) and others. In-person meetings are important, not just for the formal sessions, but for the conversations you have and the relationships you form within your selected peer group and outside your peer group, including people from across the world.
When we leave the meeting and go back to our lives and livelihoods, we want to carry those relationships with us, so we need to find ways to connect with each other between meetings. I would like to see the ACR both optimize a digital platform that allows us to interact more effectively, and tailor and focus our messages to individual members.
With regard to tailoring messages, our members tell us an awful lot about themselves based on the meetings and meeting sessions they attend, and the products of the ACR that they use or access. That information can help the ACR personalize messages, so rather than members finding College messages distracting, they will see an ACR email or notification and say, “Hey, I was just thinking about this, and now there’s a message from the College asking me to engage on that very topic.”
TR: Looking beyond 2026, what do you see as important challenges facing the College?
Dr. Harvey: Without the support of research into rheumatic diseases and their treatments, neither the current nor the next generation of patients will have the treatments they need. For example, if research funding goes away, that cuts off the pipeline of people who are training to be researchers, and since it takes a long time to go from training to becoming a successful researcher who is making discoveries, that can mean a generation of researchers lost. So we have to support needed reforms to the National Institutes of Health that will allow it to reinvigorate itself over the course of the next few years.
In addition, we need Medicare and Medicaid reform to help patients gain access to the treatments they need. It won’t matter how many new treatments we discover if those treatments are expensive and the coverage isn’t there for the patient to access the medication.
TR: Let’s talk about you personally. You have a full plate as a clinician, researcher, professor and administrator, but you still volunteer for the ACR. Why?
Dr. Harvey: The reason I volunteer is because of my love for the specialty, which has given me so much joy and fulfillment in the work that I’m able to do. In my personal journey, the College has always been there to give me new experiences and to teach me new things about being a better physician and a better leader, so it’s really become my passion to try to give some of that back.
TR: What would you like to share about yourself to help readers get to know you a bit better?
Dr. Harvey: Let’s see. I really enjoy cooking. Part of it is that things don’t always go exactly the way you expect. Maybe you run out of an ingredient or you find something that might be a nice addition to a recipe, so you adapt, you try something different, and it works out: You end up with something that is nourishing and fulfilling at the end of the day.
I approach rheumatology with the same attitude: The path may have some obstacles, but if you are willing to try something new, you can find a way forward.
What can I say? I have a lot of positivity that I hope is a little bit infectious.
Leslie Mertz, PhD, is a freelance science journalist based in northern Michigan.
