New Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Option Integrates Lifelong Learning for Board Certified Cardiologists
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) have recently announced a new option for certified cardiologists who wish to maintain their board certification. A new Collaborative Maintenance Pathway (CMP) will strive to continually improve educational and assessment processes for physicians to stay current in both knowledge and practice.
Providing an alternative MOC option was based on feedback from cardiologists across the country who expressed a desire to better integrate lifelong learning with assessment. Fred Welt, Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs for the Department of Internal Medicine, saw the need for new MOC options first-hand as a co-editor for the Cardiac Catheterization & Interventional Cardiology Self-Assessment Program (CathSAP).
“Many physicians are dissatisfied with the process of maintaining their certification in cardiology,” Welt says. “Before the introduction of this new CMP, a cardiologist was required to take an exam every 10 years. Not only is this 10-year MOC exam extremely high stakes, but it is very expensive and a lot of extra requirements also make it quite time consuming.”
While the 10-year MOC exam and the ABIM Knowledge Check-in (which requires an exam every 2 years) are still available as options for maintaining a certification, Welt encourages the use of the new CMP as it will keep knowledge current.
“The idea of cramming for an exam every 10 years does not correlate with the idea of lifelong learning,” he says. “This is especially true of cardiologists who work in private practice and not academic institutions like the University of Utah. These types of physicians don’t have educational events like Grand Rounds imbedded into their daily life, so a yearly CMP will help them stay current in practice. This ultimately leads to better overall patient care.”
The new CMP will offer performance assessments of 60 questions focused on one or two specific areas. Each assessment will cover 20 percent of the field of cardiovascular disease, so physicians can expect to have covered 100 percent of the topics in the field within five years.
The Cardiovascular Disease CMP will be available in fall 2019 through the ACC’s Adult Clinical Cardiology Self-Assessment Program (ACCSAP), with CMPs for additional subspecialties anticipated for 2020. To participate in the 2019 CMP, physicians must be currently certified by the ABIM and have already purchased ACCSAP. Seven or more hours should be spent engaging in the topic covered by the CMP, which includes reading texts, watching/listening to presentations, and completing practice questions.
For more information on MOC options, including the new CMP, please visit the Maintenance of Certification hub on the American College of Cardiology’s website.