And thank you all for joining us this afternoon for this year's Hot Topics Symposium. Dr. Schmidt and I are very excited to bring you this program this year, focusing on health equity in vulnerable populations. These are issues that are near and dear to both of us and I know to many of you in the audience. And the American Epilepsy Society has made it a commitment to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion and decrease health disparities. We've seen this through the work of various task force and committees. You might have seen it when you picked up your badge ribbons and noticed the everyone belongs ribbon. If you haven't gotten yours, there's only a few left. I hope that we order more for next year. But more specifically, I think we see that commitment to DEI in the programming of the annual committee and the annual program this year, including yesterday's ILAE symposium focusing on health disparities. It was fantastic. If you missed it, it's available on demand. I would highly recommend that. But I wanted to share with you one of the comments one of the speakers made during the panel discussion. He noted that throughout the course of the meeting, we're gonna hear many fantastic lectures talking about groundbreaking treatments, innovations in surgical techniques, genetic breakthroughs. But if you think about it, as vital as those things are to the future of our profession and the future of treating epilepsy patients, like we talked about this morning with AI, as vital as that is, right now, those things impact a very small percentage of our patients compared to the excessive impact that we see health disparities and social determinants impacting our patients on a really, on a day-to-day basis. So we talk about social determinants of health. I think we're most familiar with that and likely one of the greatest contributors to health disparities. But the things we're gonna talk about today I think would be better termed political determinants of health, as there are state, federal, international leaders casting votes, making decisions that have a direct impact on the healthcare of our patients. And so I want to talk about our learning objectives today. We are going to look at kind of four different and distinct political determinants of health. We will start with describing strategies to ensure that epilepsy patients in war-affected areas can continue to receive appropriate medical treatment. We had no idea when we decided to include this topic this summer that we would be dealing with not just one but two large global conflicts affecting millions of people. Second, we want to look at specific obstacles and concerns for our LGBTQIA patients. And I think that the proportion of patients we're seeing is much largely greater than any of us realizes as this population can become quite invisible unless we've got open and transparent communication with our patients. Then we're gonna be changing gears a little bit and we're gonna talk about some post-pandemic challenges in the access to affordable healthcare and particularly some changes with telehealth access and changes that remote work has brought in the healthcare arena. And last, now that we are one year past the Dobbs-Jackson decision, we're gonna look at some of the state and local policy changes that have impacted reproductive health for women. So our agenda for today, we'll start with Dr. Olga Tereschenko from the University of Nebraska talking about epilepsy and conflict in war-affected regions. Next, we will have Dr. Emily Johnson from Johns Hopkins University. She's gonna be sharing her experience on epilepsy care in the LGBTQIA population. Then we will have Dr. Jonathan Edwards from the Medical University of South Carolina talking about access to epilepsy care in this post-pandemic era that I mentioned. And then finally, we have Karen Dutton, who is an OBGYN, joining us from Beth Israel Deaconess. And she will be discussing how we can navigate reproductive healthcare in this changing political landscape. So a few housekeeping notes that I need to make before we begin. As the faculty are presenting cutting-edge information and unpublished data, we do not allow photos to be taken. All presentations will be available on demand for three months after the meeting. And it is the policy of AES that all faculty participating in educational activities disclose any real or apparent conflicts of interest. These disclosures can be seen on the AES website. And the online evaluation and credit claim will be open until March 18th. You need to complete the evaluations and claim credit by that date. And the pharmacy credits must be claimed by January 4th. You can see the AES website for more information. So it is a great honor. Oh, before we go to that, I'm going to mention one more thing on our agenda, that at the end of the four formal lectures, you're not gonna wanna leave. I know that there's a tendency to have a little bit of a mass exodus after the formal lectures, but you're really gonna wanna stay around for our panel discussion that we're gonna have at the end. In addition to all of our speakers that'll be joining that panel discussion, we're gonna have Dr. Hind Katani join us. She is a community epileptologist in Tampa and serves on the board of the Epilepsy Alliance of Florida. She'll be sharing her perspective and challenges of practicing in a community hospital here in Florida. And we will also be joined in the panel discussion by Dr. Naimi Valiz-Ruiz. She's associate professor at the University of Miami, and she serves as the medical director of the Women in Epilepsy Program, and also the site PI of the Moneed Study. She'll be sharing her experience of caring for women with epilepsy in today's political climate.

health equity

political determinants

epilepsy care

LGBTQIA healthcare

reproductive health