ABMS Convenes Board Congress to Discuss the Role of MOC
in Promoting Quality Patient Care

CHICAGO – Jan. 23, 2012 – The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) recently convened its third annual Board Congress to discuss the role of the ABMS Maintenance of Certification® (ABMS MOC®) program in promoting lifelong learning and continuous professional development by physicians, as well as the role of collaboration within the ABMS Board Enterprise in enhancing physician practice and promoting quality patient care. Themed, “Promoting Quality Patient Care through Meaningful Continuing Professional Development: Lifelong Learning, Collaboration and MOC,” the 2011 ABMS Board Congress was held on Sept. 21 in Chicago. For the first time, the Board Congress was integrated with the Board Staff Conference, allowing the full community of the Board Enterprise, including executive leadership, staff and volunteers from the ABMS Member Boards, to engage in collaborative sharing and learning.

“We are pleased to have brought together for the first time in ABMS history the Board Congress and the Board Staff Conference, which allowed a large number of staff from our Member Boards to work and spend time side-by-side with a large number of our governance and leadership from all of the Member Boards,” said Kevin B. Weiss, MD, ABMS President and CEO. “We started thinking about this a few years ago, and so I want to thank the leadership of the Board Staff Conference for taking the initiative to put this together.”

The 2011 ABMS Board Congress featured presentations by representatives of the ABMS Member Boards on such topics as the role of collaboration in patient-centered care, self-assessment, registry participation and other activities within the training/practice continuum. The Board Congress was co-chaired by Larry R. Faulkner, MD, President and CEO of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN), and Richard E. Hawkins, MD, ABMS Senior Vice President for Professional and Scientific Affairs.

Dr. Faulkner discussed the role collaboration plays in improving communications between the physician, patient and health system, advancing a physician’s practice, and ensuring quality patient care. Lifelong learning is a challenging process that requires a truly collaborative effort in order to be successful, he said. Dr. Faulkner noted that physician competence is an obvious critical element in promoting quality patient care, and that a competent physician possesses and demonstrates the special knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors required to provide quality patient care.

“If physician competence is vitally important, then MOC is absolutely crucial to promoting ongoing physician competence,” said Dr. Faulkner, who is Board Certified in Psychiatry by ABPN. “To be relevant, Member Board MOC requirements must promote continuing physician competence required to provide quality patient care.”

Lifelong learning requires an assessment of deficiencies and for physicians to take steps to correct their deficiencies, he said, adding that if the ABMS Member Boards want the physicians whom they certify to achieve true lifelong learning, it will require the Member Boards to ensure that those physicians are involved in a supportive, nurturing and collaborative network that promotes lifelong learning efforts in a positive, constructive way.

F. Daniel Duffy, MD, who chairs the ABMS MOC Committee and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine, discussed the changing paradigm from a profession-centric world of medicine to a patient-centered world. Patients are now more in control of their care and they are determined to decide the type of care they want, he added.

“The medical community is now enrooted in patient-based professionalism,” Dr. Duffy said. “Here, quality and safety are values defined by patients, family and culture; processes are designed to add value from the patients’ perspective of quality; measuring the patients’ experience of care provides evidence of quality and patient-centered care puts patients – not the profession – in control of their care.”

Dr. Duffy noted that through MOC and continuing medical education (CME), the Member Boards have the opportunity to transform the value of care through a new type of CME focused on practice-based learning and improvement aimed at serving patients’ needs and desires.

John G. Clarkson, MD, Executive Director and CEO of the American Board of Ophthalmology (ABOp) and a Member of the ABMS Executive Committee and the ABMS Board of Directors, and Ms. Beth Ann Comber, ABOp Administrator, discussed the distinguishing roles of ABOp and its professional society, the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), how a collaborative educational effort began and how both organizations and practicing physicians continue to benefit from the relationship.

“It has long been an arms-length relationship between AAO and ABOp because AAO’s main role is to educate and our main role is to evaluate and to certify,” said Dr. Clarkson, who is Board Certified in Ophthalmology by ABOp. 

Ms. Comber added that the collaboration between ABOp and AAO led to the development of the Practicing Ophthalmologists Curriculum (POC), which identifies and defines areas of knowledge important to the delivery of quality eye care as a basis for the content of examinations for the MOC process. The POC serves as the basis for ABOp’s examination procedures and AAO’s study tools that support physicians’ preparation for and participation in MOC.

“The development of the POC strengthened the relationship between ABOp
and AAO, and helped build a framework for further collaboration,” Comber said. “It
has enhanced communications, whereby both organizations work together to provide
unified and supportive information to the ophthalmic community. Additionally, it will lead to work toward an ophthalmic registry that will increase the standards of assessment while reducing the burden of going through the MOC process.”

Mark A. Malangoni, MD, Associate Executive Director of the American Board of Surgery (ABS), described the important role that registries play in supporting MOC and improving patient care. He was joined by Richard C. Thirlby, MD, an attending surgeon who directs the Gastrointestinal Cancer Program and serves as the Program Director for General Surgery Residency at Virginia Mason Medical Center.
“Registries should be developed and used because they are the right thing to do for patients,” said Dr. Malangoni, who is Board Certified in Surgery by ABS and has a subspecialty certificate in Surgical Critical Care. “They can help physicians address issues of care, such as preventable readmissions and hospital-acquired infections, as well as cost.”

Dr. Malangoni referenced the American College of Surgeons’ (ACS) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP), which began nearly 20 years ago and has been increasingly used in hospitals in the U.S. and abroad. The ACS NSQIP is the first nationally validated, risk-adjusted, outcomes-based program to measure and improve the quality of surgical care. Peer-reviewed studies have shown ACS NSQIP is effective in improving the quality of surgical care and reducing complications, leading to lower costs. Participation in ACS NSQIP helps surgeons meet MOC Part IV requirements, he said.

Dr. Thirlby, who is Board Certified in Surgery by ABS, presented on a collaborative in the state of Washington called the Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP), which is a regional registry program that focuses on defining, tracking, benchmarking and improving quality.
SCOAP participants receive regular reports of hospital-level data that provide the information they need to effectively make improvements in care by comparing and tracking their own processes and outcomes, Dr. Thirlby explained. It enables surgeons and hospitals to identify opportunities to improve outcomes and then to benchmark themselves with their colleagues across the state, he added.

“SCOAP is an engaged community of clinicians working to build a safer, higher quality and more cost-effective surgical health care system. It has metrics that have been linked to better outcomes,” Dr. Thirlby said. SCOAP, which is now utilized at more than 50 hospitals in Washington state, is working to certify that participation by surgeons meet the requirements of MOC Part IV.

Dave Davis, MD, the Senior Director of the Continuing Education and Performance Improvement for the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and a Certificant of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, noted the discontinuous nature of the medical education continuum, and the need for the medical community to make it more continuous and seamless.

“In order to make the system more seamless, there must be better educational delivery methods, better research on learning, more seamlessness certification and recertification, better competency assessment measures and better feedback,” Dr. Davis said.

He cited some of the AAMC’s current system-based efforts, including the: (1) Integrating Quality Initiative, an organizational performance improvement project developed to assist its members in enhancing their dual quality goals of providing outstanding clinical care while educating practicing and future physicians; (2) Best Practice for Better Care (BPBC), a unique collaboration that focuses the three mission areas of academic medicine – medical education, patient care and research – on the challenge of improving the quality and safety of patient care; (3) Teaching Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, a subset of BPBC which promotes the teaching and role-modeling of quality and safety practices, many of which were pioneered at medical schools and teaching hospitals, into the education and training of new physicians and (4) Aligning and Educating for Quality, an effort to help academic medical centers integrate and align existing programs of faculty and staff development, quality and performance improvement, quality reporting, CME and professional, staff and organizational development.

The Board Congress was established in 2009 to create a venue for the ABMS Member Boards to share MOC “best practices” with each other.

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About ABMS
For more than 75 years, the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) has been the medical organization overseeing physician certification in the United States. It assists its 24 Member Boards in their efforts to develop and implement educational and professional standards for the evaluation and certification of physician specialists. ABMS Member Boards provide physician certification information to ABMS for its certification verification service programs. ABMS is recognized by the key health care credentialing accreditation entities as a primary equivalent source of Board Certification data for medical specialists. Patients can visit www.CertificationMatters.org or call toll-free (866) ASK-ABMS to see if their physician is Board Certified by an ABMS Member Board.  For more information about ABMS, visit www.abms.org or call (312) 436-2600.

The 24 Member Boards that comprise the ABMS Board Enterprise and certify nearly 800,000 physicians include the American Board of Allergy and Immunology, American Board of Anesthesiology, American Board of Colon and Rectal Surgery, American Board of Dermatology, American Board of Emergency Medicine, American Board of Family Medicine, American Board of Internal Medicine, American Board of Medical Genetics, American Board of Neurological Surgery, American Board of Nuclear Medicine, American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, American Board of Ophthalmology, American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, American Board of Otolaryngology, American Board of Pathology, American Board of Pediatrics, American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, American Board of Plastic Surgery, American Board of Preventive Medicine, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, American Board of Radiology, American Board of Surgery, American Board of Thoracic Surgery and American Board of Urology.