TL;DR — The American Medical Association House of Delegates meets twice in 2026. The Annual Meeting runs June 5–10, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago; the Interim Meeting runs November 6–10, 2026 at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando. About 700 delegates representing state medical associations, specialty societies, AMA sections, federal services, and professional interest groups will debate resolutions and adopt policy on Medicare payment reform, prior authorization, AI in clinical practice, scope of practice, physician burnout, drug pricing, and Medicaid. The on-time resolution deadline for Annual 2026 closed April 21, 2026 at noon Central. AMA policy adopted at HOD is the official position of organized medicine — it shapes CMS rulemaking, state legislation, specialty society alignment, and health-system guidelines. Healthcare companies, journalists, policy analysts, and patient advocates all have legitimate reasons to follow it.

What the AMA House of Delegates Is

The American Medical Association House of Delegates (HOD) is the legislative and policymaking body of the AMA. It is the venue where the policy positions of organized medicine in the United States are debated, amended, and adopted. The chamber meets twice a year — a larger Annual Meeting in June and a more focused Interim Meeting in November — and votes on resolutions submitted by state medical associations, national medical specialty societies, AMA sections, federal services, and the AMA Board of Trustees.

What HOD votes on becomes AMA policy. AMA policy becomes the official position of the largest physician organization in the country on the issues that drive how American medicine is paid, regulated, and practiced. That includes Medicare physician payment, prior authorization, artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence in clinical care, scope of practice for non-physician providers, drug pricing, biosimilar substitution, telehealth, physician workforce, and dozens of more specific clinical and administrative topics each cycle.

HOD is not the AMA's only policy mechanism — the Board of Trustees, the Councils, and the staff also drive policy — but it is the one where the broader physician community has direct, structured voice. For anyone who needs to understand where organized medicine is going on a given issue, the HOD record is the primary source.

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AMA House of Delegates 2026: Key Dates and Logistics

Two meetings per year matters more than it sounds. The June Annual Meeting in Chicago is the larger and more procedurally important of the two — full elections, the President-Elect cycle, the bulk of new resolutions, and the most extensive media coverage. The November Interim Meeting in Orlando is shorter and more focused, usually used to react to fast-moving regulatory and legislative developments. Policy threads frequently originate at one Interim and mature into adopted policy at the next Annual, so the meetings have to be read as a continuous twelve-month arc, not two separate events.

Who Sits in the Chamber

The composition of the House of Delegates matters because it shapes which issues get serious debate, which positions carry the day, and which constituencies are heard.

State medical associations hold delegate seats allocated by AMA membership in each state. State delegations are typically led by long-serving practicing physicians with deep state-level advocacy experience and a strong interest in scope of practice, Medicaid policy, licensure, and physician workforce. They are generalists across health policy with a state-political lens.

National medical specialty societies — the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Surgeons, the American College of Radiology, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and dozens more — send delegations that represent specialty-specific clinical and economic concerns. These delegations carry the bulk of substantive clinical-policy debate at HOD.

AMA sections represent demographic and career-stage segments of the membership: medical students, residents and fellows, young physicians, senior physicians, women physicians, international medical graduates, minority affairs, and integrated physician practice. Section delegations are increasingly influential on burnout, wellness, equity, and workforce sustainability.

Federal services delegations represent military, Public Health Service, and Veterans Affairs physicians. They carry weight on issues at the intersection of clinical practice and federal policy — telehealth licensure, AI procurement, controlled substance prescribing, and emergency preparedness.

Professional interest medical associations — including the American Medical Women's Association, the American Osteopathic Association, and the National Medical Association — expand the policy conversation across communities the state and specialty delegations do not always represent fully.

The implication for anyone trying to follow or influence HOD is that the chamber is not a single audience. It is a federation of delegations with overlapping but distinct priorities, and which delegations align on a given resolution often decides whether it passes, gets amended, or is referred for study.

Resolutions and Policy Issues to Watch at HOD 2026

Resolutions for the 2026 Annual Meeting had to be submitted by the on-time deadline of April 21, 2026 at noon Central, with a small number of late resolutions admissible under tighter rules. The full handbook with the resolution slate, board reports, and council reports is published by the Speaker's office in advance. The themes likely to dominate floor time at HOD 2026 are unsurprising in their broad outlines but consequential in their specifics:

Medicare physician payment reform

The continuing decline in real Medicare physician payment relative to practice cost inflation has been a sustained AMA policy priority. Expect resolutions calling for a permanent inflationary update tied to the Medicare Economic Index, structural reform of the conversion factor, and a re-examination of budget neutrality rules that have driven a decade of cuts. Specialty societies whose members are most exposed to fee schedule volatility — primary care, emergency medicine, surgery — will be especially active.

Prior authorization reform

Prior authorization continues to be one of the most concrete day-to-day pain points for practicing physicians. Resolutions in this area typically push for transparency requirements on payer denial criteria, gold-card programs that exempt high-performing physicians from prior authorization, and federal legislative action to standardize the prior authorization process across payers. AMA has been a leading national voice on this issue, and HOD 2026 will almost certainly add to the policy record.

Augmented intelligence and AI in clinical practice

The AMA has deliberately adopted the term "augmented intelligence" to frame AI as a tool that supports rather than replaces physician judgment. Expect resolutions on physician liability when AI tools influence clinical decisions, payer use of AI in coverage determinations, transparency in AI training data and clinical performance, the role of AI scribes in documentation, and the integration of AI into medical education. This is the policy area moving fastest year over year.

Scope of practice for non-physician providers

Scope of practice is a perennial HOD topic and a sustained area of state-legislative activity. Expect resolutions reinforcing the physician-led care team model, addressing nurse practitioner and physician assistant scope expansion, and refining AMA positions on optometry, podiatry, naturopathy, and other professional categories where scope debates are active in state legislatures.

Physician burnout and administrative burden

Burnout policy at HOD increasingly focuses on specific administrative drivers — documentation burden, prior authorization, electronic health record usability, payer reporting requirements — rather than wellness programming. Expect resolutions tied to concrete administrative-burden reduction and to the protection of physician mental health treatment-seeking from licensure and credentialing consequences.

Drug pricing, PBM reform, and biosimilar substitution

The intersection of drug pricing, pharmacy benefit manager practices, and biosimilar substitution policy continues to be a substantive HOD area. Expect resolutions on PBM transparency, prescriber-determined biosimilar substitution, and the role of 340B in the broader drug pricing conversation.

Medicaid, telehealth, and workforce

Medicaid policy, telehealth payment parity beyond the public health emergency-era flexibilities, and physician workforce expansion are recurring HOD themes, especially as federal and state policy continues to evolve in each area.

How to Follow HOD 2026 Substantively

Most organizations that pay close attention to HOD do not send a full team to the meeting. They follow the proceedings through a combination of primary AMA publications and structured relationships with delegations. The practical playbook:

For healthcare companies whose categories are policy-exposed, the right cadence is to follow HOD substantively year-round, not just during the meeting itself. The AMA's published policies, the trajectory of specialty society positions, and the resolutions being introduced are all leading indicators of where regulatory and clinical-practice expectations are heading. That is the same intelligence discipline a serious KOL program or conference investment strategy should already be building.

What HOD 2026 Means for Healthcare Companies

If you market a regulated medical product, the AMA House of Delegates is one of the highest-leverage policy venues in U.S. medicine. AMA adopted policies are routinely cited by CMS in rulemaking, by state legislatures in scope and licensure debates, by specialty societies setting their own positions, and by health systems writing internal clinical guidelines. A favorable AMA position on your category — augmented intelligence, remote patient monitoring, non-opioid pain management, biosimilar substitution, ambulatory surgical innovation — is worth more in adoption leverage than almost any individual endorsement.

The implication is that medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, digital health platforms, and healthcare technology vendors with categories that are routinely the subject of AMA policy should treat HOD as a strategic policy venue, not a marketing event. That means investing in relationships with the delegations whose specialty or geography aligns with your category, building peer-reviewed evidence that gets cited in reference committee testimony, supporting AMA and AMA Foundation programs aligned with your therapeutic area, and contributing thought-leadership content on issues delegates are actively debating. We've laid out the specific marketing-side playbook in our companion piece on the AMA HOD 2026 marketing guide, including caucus sponsorship economics, the AMA corporate roundtable, and JAMA evidence-publication strategy.

Whether you sit in the chamber, observe it as a credentialed industry stakeholder, or follow the policy record from the outside, the underlying truth is the same: HOD 2026 is the venue where organized medicine sets the positions that shape the U.S. healthcare market for the next several years. Treat it accordingly. The brands and policy teams that follow it carefully — and the primary care delegations and specialty caucuses they invest in over time — are the ones that get to participate in the debate rather than react to its outcomes.