American Medical Association awards ACLM CEO Susan Benigas its 2025 Medical Executive Meritorious Achievement Award

The award honors medical society executives who’ve made excellent contributions to the career of drugs by enhancing medical observe, training, or public well being.

ST. LOUIS, Nov. 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The American Medical Association (AMA) has awarded Susan Benigas, chief govt officer of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), its 2025 Medical Executive Meritorious Achievement Award for her distinctive management and repair in advancing way of life drugs to enhance affected person outcomes. The award honors medical society executives who’ve made excellent contributions to the career of drugs by enhancing medical observe, training, or public well being.

Since becoming a member of ACLM in 2014, Benigas has led the group by a interval of extraordinary progress in dimension, scope, attain and affect. During her tenure, ACLM has grown from 380 members and one part-time employees member to a thriving 15,000-member medical skilled society at the moment with a staff of 45 employees members working throughout 23 states. Under her path, the College has change into a driving drive in medical training reform, embedding way of life drugs—together with meals as drugs—into undergraduate, graduate, and persevering with medical training. It additionally helps its members with complete observe steering, together with professional consensus statements, medical observe tips, medical observe instruments, and patient-facing academic sources, coupled with groundbreaking analysis, key partnerships, and advocacy to take away observe boundaries.

In 2016, Benigas co-founded the Lifestyle Medicine Global Alliance (LMGA) below ACLM’s umbrella, increasing the attain of way of life drugs worldwide. What started as a collaboration amongst 5 nationwide societies has grown right into a coalition of 32 way of life drugs medical societies the world over.

“Susan Benigas exemplifies visionary leadership, tirelessly advancing evidence-based approaches that have made a profound impact on the medical profession and the patients we serve,” mentioned AMA Board Chair David H. Aizuss, MD. “Her commitment to innovation, collaboration, and education has helped bring lifestyle medicine into mainstream health care, empowering physicians to address the causes of chronic disease. Her work exemplifies outstanding medical executive leadership.”

Lifestyle drugs is an evidence-based medical specialty that applies therapeutic way of life interventions to deal with, reverse, and stop persistent situations like cardiovascular ailments, kind 2 diabetes, and weight problems. By empowering sufferers to make way of life conduct modifications in six interconnected pillars—complete meals, plant-predominant diet, bodily exercise, restorative sleep, stress administration, connectedness, and dangerous substance avoidance—way of life drugs goals to eradicate the basis reason behind a illness.

Today, an estimated 60% of Americans, together with far too many youngsters, stay with not less than one persistent illness, contributing to the almost $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare prices borne by taxpayers, although the overwhelming majority of those situations are treatable. Studies have proven that way of life drugs can affect as much as 80% of persistent ailments.

The remedy, reversal and prevention of persistent illness at its root trigger stays the group’s focus below Benigas’ management, with a imaginative and prescient by which way of life drugs is the muse of well being and all well being care and the usual of care aim is well being restoration quite than mere administration of illness.

“I’m grateful to the AMA Board of Trustees for this special recognition. I see this, though, as a team, rather than individual, acknowledgment. Without our incredible team, ACLM would not be where it is today: the nation’s fastest-growing medical professional association. ACLM is a transformation catalyst and magnet for purpose-, passion-driven people, which is true for our board, our members, and our staff—all united as a galvanized force for change. We’re united in addressing our nation’s most pressing health issues, with lifestyle medicine delivering the hope, healing and health our world so desperately needs.” 

The award was offered by AMA President and ACLM member Bobby Mukkamala, MD, DipABLM, at ACLM’s current annual convention, Lifestyle Medicine 2025, on the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas, on Nov. 19. The occasion was a sellout for in-person attendance of two,200 and digital attendance of slightly below 3,000.

About ACLM®: The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) is the nation’s medical skilled society advancing the sphere of way of life drugs as the muse of a redesigned, value-based and equitable well being care supply system, important to attaining the Quintuple Aim and whole-person well being. ACLM represents, advocates for, trains, certifies and equips its members to determine and eradicate the basis reason behind persistent illness by optimizing modifiable danger components. ACLM is filling the gaping void of way of life drugs in medical training, offering greater than 1.2 million hours of way of life drugs training to physicians and different well being professionals since 2004, whereas additionally advancing analysis, medical observe and reimbursement methods.

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SOURCE American College of Lifestyle Medicine