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News about Continuing Medical Education and Maintenance of Certification To learn more about the reforms underway in CME and MOC, Audio-Digest Foundation hosted a discussion between Dr. Murray Kopelow, Chief Executive of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (the body that accredits CME providers in the US), Dr. Stephen H. Miller, the outgoing President and CEO of the American Board of Medical Specialties (the organization that oversees physician certification), and Dr. Carol Havens, Regional Director for Clinical Education at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. LISTEN NOW Historically, continuing medical education has been a teacher-centered process in which courses are developed based in large part on what the expert/teacher believes the learner needs to know and, to some degree, what the learner says he or she wants to know — as opposed to what he or she may really need to know. CME of the future will be a learner-centered process based on practice-specific problems or questions (gaps in knowledge or competency) that the physician identifies through regular self-assessment. CME providers will be expected to help physicians identify those knowledge/competency gaps, to develop CME courses that address those gaps, and to demonstrate that their CME courses help to close the gaps — ideally, changing practice behavior and improving patient outcomes. Changes in the CME process reflect similar changes in the way medical specialty boards certify physicians. Instead of a single examination every six to ten years, most specialty boards have adopted a program involving continuous professional development called maintenance of certification (MOC) as a formal means of measuring a physician's continued competency in his or her certified specialty and/or subspecialty. To maintain certification in a specialty, physicians will be expected to evaluate their clinical practice according to specialty-specific standards and to assess the quality of care they provide compared to peers and to national benchmarks. They will be expected to prove through formalized examination that they have the fundamental knowledge and skills to provide quality care. And they will be expected to participate in life-long learning and self-assessment programs that meet specialty-specific standards. The reforms underway in CME and MOC will require active participation by physicians to evaluate their practice on a regular basis, to measure their performance against competency standards and guidelines, and to demonstrate changes in their practice that are performance based. LISTEN NOW The presentation is held as copyrighted (c) by the Audio-Digest Foundation. Through this notice, the Audio-Digest Foundation grants permission for downloading and distributing the presentation for educational purposes. These materials may not be used, in whole or in part, for any commercial purposes.
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