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ABFM to pilot alternative to board exam
By Jonathan Nelson
At this year’s AAFP Congress of Delegates in New Orleans, the American Board of Family Medicine announced plans to pilot a longitudinal assessment alternative to the 10-year secure examination family physicians must take to maintain board certification. This option will be available to physicians who are current with continuous certification and are due to take the exam in 2019.
Based on ABFM’s popular Continuous Knowledge Self-Assessment platform, the new assessment option will deliver 25 questions online each quarter to diplomates who choose to participate.
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Looking for a few good family doctors to help improve a quality measure
By Shari Glickman, MSSW, PMP
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to recruit provider practices to help test an electronic clinical quality measure, or eCQM. The measure title is “Documentation of a Health Care Partner for Patients with Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment.”
The measure requires that a patient’s health care surrogate or partner’s contact information (email address and/or phone number) be documented in structured fields of the electronic health record or electronic medical record. Testing activities include practice staff — clinicians and practice managers — speaking with the Mathematica team about the practices’ workflows and the data elements they capture in their EHRs. We also ask practices to submit an extract of de-identified patient-level data from the EHR for analysis, including the data elements required for the eCQM, such as a health care surrogate or partner’s contact information. Finally, we ask practices to permit trained chart abstractors to review the data elements in a sample of patient charts.
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