The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) has joined the Human Dx Alliance formed to help address the gaps that exist in providing specialty care to underserved patients.

 

The Alliance is part of the Human Diagnosis Project ("Human Dx"), an online system that allows doctors to directly help their patients and each other while simultaneously building a system to help patients and physicians worldwide. The newly formed Alliance will support Human Dx's mission to create more accurate, affordable, and accessible health care for millions of underserved Americans.

 

Specifically, over the next five years, the Alliance will scale the Human Dx system to support the U.S. medical safety net and help close the specialty care gap for 30 million patients. In the coming decades, Human Dx will work to expand the Alliance globally as it builds one open health system for all.

 

"As the nation's leading organization overseeing physician specialty certification, ABMS and its 24 Member Boards recognize the domestic and international gap that exists for the most vulnerable populations with regard to access to specialty care," stated ABMS President and Chief Executive Officer Lois Margaret Nora, MD, JD, MBA. "Human Dx has the potential to improve the health and well-being of patients in this country, and ultimately across the globe."

 

Also joining the Alliance from the Member Boards Community are the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and ABIM Foundation , as well as ABMS Associate Members, the American Medical Association and Association of American Medical Colleges . Other Alliance members include the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved , National Association of Community Health Centers , and Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) is collaborating with the 

American Geriatrics Society on a project to develop eight to ten Virtual Patient Cases

(VPCs) to help clinicians across multiple specialties increase their kn o wledge and competence in the delivery of quality care to older adults. Developed by physicians across several specialties, the VPCs focus on "cross-cutting" geriatrics car e topics that represent clinical problems common to older adults and that are relevant to multiple specialty physicians. The VPCs are expected to be published to the GeriatricsCareOnline.org portal in July 2018. Continuing medical education credit will be available to physicians who successfully complete the educational activity.

The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) Multi-Specialty  Portfolio Program (Portfolio Program ™) hosted a booth at the 25th Annual American Hospital Association (AHA)  Leadership Summit held July 27-29 in San Diego. The Summit served as an opp ortunity for David Price, MD, FAAFP, FACEHP, Senior Vice President of ABMS Research and Education Foundation and Executive Director of 

the Portfolio Progr a m, and Susie Flynn, Director of Academic Services, to discuss  the program's benefits with hospital executives and chief medical officers. The Portfolio Program was created to offer physicians who are Board Certified by one of the participating ABMS Member Boards the opportunity to earn Maintenance of Certification Improvement in Medical Practice (Part IV) credit for their involvement in institutional quality and performance improvement activiti es. In April, AHA joined the Portfolio Program enabling hospitals and health systems participating in its Health Research & Educational Trust's Hospital Improvement Innovation Network to offer this opportunity to their physicians. This is the first network of its kind in the country to offer this service to its more than 1,600 participating hospitals. 

The Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program was stimulated by the release of two key publications by the Institute of Medicine ( To Err is Human in 1999 and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century  in 2001) and the subsequent establishment of the six core competencies  by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education . During the past decade, MOC has undergone substantial evolution, varying to some degree for each of the 24 ABMS Member Boards . During this same period, quality improvement (QI) activities in physician offices, community hospitals, and academic medical centers have increased dramatically.

 

Focusing on the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as an example of an academic medical center, a number of QI initiatives have been established at both the department and hospital level in the past several years.

"My personal perspective is that much of this QI activity has been catalyzed by MOC and the emphasis on physician participation in QI initiatives."

The American  Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) has teamed up with Osmosis , a collaborative  learning platform that offers educational content for medical students, to

develop a vi de o   on how to write effective test questions for undergraduate, graduate, 

and continuing m e dical education. This video, which focuses on testing application of  knowledge in patient care rather than just recalling isolated  medical fa cts, is designed to be helpful  in training item writers and reviewers. David Swanson, PhD, ABMS' Vice President of Academic Programs and Services, and Kathy Holtzman, ABMS' Director of Assessment and International Operations, provide suggestions and advice to ensure that your test questions make the grade.