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 medication by bettering medical observe, training, or public well being.

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

Since becoming a member of ACLM in 2014, Benigas has led the group by means of a interval of extraordinary progress in dimension, scope, attain and impression. During her tenure, ACLM has grown from 380 members and one part-time workers member to a thriving 15,000-member medical skilled society immediately with a staff of 45 workers members working throughout 23 states. Under her course, the College has turn into a driving power in medical training reform, embedding life-style medication—together with meals as medication—into undergraduate, graduate, and persevering with medical training. It additionally helps its members with complete observe steerage, together with knowledgeable consensus statements, scientific observe tips, scientific observe instruments, and patient-facing academic assets, 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 life-style medication worldwide. What started as a collaboration amongst 5 nationwide societies has grown right into a coalition of 32 life-style medication 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 medication is an evidence-based medical specialty that applies therapeutic life-style interventions to deal with, reverse, and stop power circumstances like cardiovascular illnesses, sort 2 diabetes, and weight problems. By empowering sufferers to make life-style habits modifications in six interconnected pillars—entire meals, plant-predominant vitamin, bodily exercise, restorative sleep, stress administration, connectedness, and dangerous substance avoidance—life-style medication goals to eradicate the basis reason behind a illness.

Today, an estimated 60% of Americans, together with far too many youngsters, dwell with at the least one power illness, contributing to the practically $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare prices borne by taxpayers, though the overwhelming majority of those circumstances are treatable. Studies have proven that life-style medication can impression as much as 80% of power illnesses.

The remedy, reversal and prevention of power illness at its root trigger stays the group’s focus below Benigas’ management, with a imaginative and prescient by which life-style medication is the inspiration of well being and all well being care and the usual of care aim is well being restoration fairly 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 latest 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 life-style medication as the inspiration 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 establish and eradicate the basis reason behind power illness by optimizing modifiable danger components. ACLM is filling the gaping void of life-style medication in medical training, offering greater than 1.2 million hours of life-style medication training to physicians and different well being professionals since 2004, whereas additionally advancing analysis, scientific observe and reimbursement methods.

SOURCE American College of Lifestyle Medicine