All right. Well, welcome, everyone. We weren't sure how many people we'd see here, because we've had this workshop for the past several years. So this is an update, but we're really happy to see you all, and our presentation is going to be relatively brief so that we can allow enough time for questions, because usually when people come to this presentation, they have lots of questions. So actually, there are four of us here who can answer those, myself, Bob Bolin, Dr. Jeff Linus, the new CEO of the ABPN, and Patty Vondrack, who is the vice president of the ABPN. So this is, for those of you who might be in the wrong place, this is New and Improved, the ABPN Continuing Certification Program. So what used to be called Maintenance of Certification, called Continuing Certification. So this is really an informative presentation. We're going to really talk about the board who creates, who are the folks who create Continuing Certification, and kind of the mechanics of it, and of your career through Continuing Certification, and even questions about how to navigate the website and details that you might want to ask, and also sources of information. Clicker's not working. Oh, the space bar. There you go. Do you want to give your, I can actually give Dr. Bolin's disclosures. Bob Bolin is here, he's my co-presenter. He is the senior vice president and chief of staff at the Menninger Clinic. He's professor and vice chair in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Baylor College of Medicine. He is the Brown Foundation Endowed Chair in Psychiatry, and you can email him. These are my disclosures that I just added. As of November, I'm now Professor Emerita at Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Other disclosures, so I'm currently, this year, the chair of the board of directors of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and I'm also still on the Psychiatry Review Committee for ACGME, and I'm also a director of the American Board of Family Medicine, a liaison director. Family Medicine actually has a psychiatrist, internist, surgeon, and pediatrician on their boards, which is kind of interesting. So what we're going to talk about today, the general format, is the mission and people. Who are we? I think it's really surprising to me how little folks, and it's our fault, the board's fault, for not really letting people know who is the board? Who are these people who create these things and write the questions? And so we're going to talk a little bit about that and ABPM leadership. I'm going to show you and talk about who we are. Some of the things that we did during COVID-19, we actually, I have our diversity and inclusion statement up on my computer that we can go through, and we're going to go into details of continuing certification. So this is a really broad path. One of the things, diagram of the path, the really odd and frustrating things about American Medical Education, including continuing education, is we've got so many stakeholders. We have so many different bodies. We've got an organization that accredits residency programs. We've got bodies that accredit undergraduate medical education. We have the boards, the American Board of Medical Specialties that provide certification, and then on and on. So we've got licensing boards, but every state has its own licensing board, so it's really confusing. People from other countries, I think, look at us and think, what's wrong with those folks? But so this is a much more kind of general pathway, you know, simpler. Obviously, we go to medical school, and we get our MDs or DOs. We progress to residency and fellowship, and usually during residency, obviously, we get a temporary license, and then we get a permanent license. We're eligible to get a permanent license when we graduate. And then we go into clinical practice, and during that time, shortly after we graduate from residency, most of us apply for specialty certification, and most of us request and apply for certifications through the ABPN, which is a member board of the American Board of Medical Specialties. The American Board of Medical Specialties consists of 24 different boards, so there's the American Board of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Ophthalmology. Psychiatry and Neurology have always been together, but you notice psychiatry is listed first, as Dr. Faulkner has pointed out. And our board has been around since 1935. So we're not the first, but we're one of the early boards that was established. And the mission of the board is really to promote and assess competence in psychiatrists and neurologists, to promote and assess competence in psychiatrists and neurologists so that we can ensure that they deliver quality care to a diverse population in an equitable way and also with really quality care. That's the mission, in a nutshell. Move forward. Oh, there you go. Allow physicians to demonstrate their expertise and their abilities to provide high-quality, inclusive patient care to diverse populations and do it in a credible way to reassure patients and families about our competence. Now, the mission, I think that is sometimes what people have a question about. We don't accredit residency programs. We don't say that people have to be board-certified to get their license. This is all we do. And the folks who really make up the ABPN are physicians like us. There's the CEO, Dr. Linus. There's a staff of about 40. And then the rest of us are volunteers. Most of the directors are deans or chairs or residency program directors or vice chairs. And we volunteer for this role, mostly because we love it. We love medical education. And we have over 300 committee members who volunteer their time to choose articles and write questions, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. Like, if you're all psychiatrists and neurologists, the board has eight psychiatrist directors and eight neurology directors. And we make sure that there's a good representation for the subspecialties such as child and geriatrics and addiction in there as well. And, again, the 40 staff. So this is a picture of all of us, so you kind of see who we are. I don't know if you know any of these folks. I'm going to go through them and name them. This was Larry Faulkner's retirement party. As you know, Larry Faulkner was the CEO of the board for 16 years, and he stepped down a year ago. So if we start from the far left, the lady in the blue dress is Andrea Stoler, who is a dean of students at Baylor. I won't give details about their qualifications, but generally who they are. Let's see, is that in line? I can't tell from here. There are two neurologists there, Iran Jafar, Nina Shore, who is deputy director at NINH. Behind her is Amy Brooks-Cayle, who's chair of neurology at UC Davis. Front, John Bodensteiner from Mayo Clinic. And then behind him is Bob Bowman, who's sitting right here, who I told you about. Steve Lewis behind him. Steve is chair of the division of neurology, which means the department is in Pennsylvania, Lehigh. Then Dr. Faulkner, who's former CEO, behind him. Alison Brashear, she is dean of the medical school at University of Buffalo. Me behind her, and that's Terry Cassino, Mayo Clinic neurologist behind me. Front row, Dr. Linus on the right. Erica Green behind him. I'm going to go a little faster. Josepha Chong behind Erica. David Henderson behind Josepha. He's chair at BU. To his right, Chris Thomas, who is professor emeritus at UTMB. And then Sheldon Benjamin on the far right, who is vice chair at UMass. So it gives you an idea of folks, and you can say, well, that's a lot of academic folks. There's a number of reasons for that. We want to have people who are knowledgeable about medical education because they're choosing articles and writing questions. So we want to have folks who have those skill sets. Also, people in private practice have a hard time. Really, for them, it's a significant loss of income. We try and get them to serve on committees, folks in private practice, and we would welcome any of your suggestions, but for a lot of them it's a significant loss of income. So that's another reason why we're heavy on folks in academic careers. So, yeah, there's the names of the folks, but I think it's nice that you got to see the faces. Oh, there are two new ones that actually aren't in that picture. Directors serve four-year terms, and then they can re-up for another four. So most of us serve a total of eight years. And what we do, what do we do during that time? We have four meetings a year. Two of those are in lovely, beautiful suburban Deerfield, Illinois. And then there are committee meetings where we are using a lot more virtual meetings. Right now people prefer them and they're less expensive. So really we think of a board certification as the gold standard for physicians, that if you have taken and passed your certification exam and you fulfill all the other criteria for continuing certification, you have an unrestricted license and you participate in continuing certification and fulfill all the requirements, really you've achieved a mark of excellence, a standard of excellence. Okay. Bob, I think you're coming in a few more slides. So why? You know, this comes up a lot and has come up a lot in the last 15 years. A lot of complaints about why do I have to pay this money? Can't I just do CME? Can't I just read on my own? I know what I need to know. Right? And the fact is that we know there's a good deal of neuroscience around learning. And one of the things we do know is that physicians are really not very good at assessing their own competence. We just aren't. And having an independent assessment of our knowledge and skills is extremely important. In addition, you look at other professions like airline pilots, for example, teachers, even folks who are certified in lifesaving for Red Cross, they have to undergo routine recertification and assessments of their skills. Why are physicians entitled to be different? We also know that knowledge changes, and all of you are here because you want to update your knowledge, which is wonderful, so I think that this makes sense to you, that knowledge base changes. And so we have to keep up. But we tend to, for example, rotate to topics that we like and we feel we're good at and that we're not comfortable with. So one of the things that continuing certification really should do is make sure we keep up in areas that we're really not as skilled or knowledgeable about. So that's why just reading what you want in journals is probably, actually definitely, but probably not sufficient. And so the certification exam and the new article-based continuing certification is really created by your peers. We are a bunch of your peers, your colleagues, who have the same interests, the same patient care responsibilities as you do, and we want to write continuing certification and make continuing certification that we would want to use. And, in fact, we do. All of us participate in continuing certification. It's a requirement. So we are very motivated and committed to making a learning experience that is value-added, that is feasible within people's busy schedule, not too expensive, that we want to select articles that we feel are important for our advancement in our field and important clinically for good clinical work. So it's not that we're perfect and we're learning to write better questions for exams, but in terms of our level of commitment, that's where it comes from. Also, the exam is based on, is really, reflects diplomate feedback. How many of you are participating in ABCC so far? Okay. Do you notice that after you take an exam, you're asked about what you thought about the article and thought about the questions? And also, if you feel that a question is wrong, you can put that in and it can be corrected in real time. And if you'd like to suggest an article for ABCC, we're really glad to hear from you. Okay. So this is from the Disney film. People remember Chris's story. This is a prominent book that came out several years ago that has a lot about the neuroscience of learning. And some of the basic principles behind effective learning. And what many of us older folks used to do in medical school is we'd read a chapter and we wouldn't do a post-test. We'd go back and reread right before the exam, mass reading. We know now that's a very effective way of learning. It's just, in a way, kind of time wasted. So we tried to incorporate some of the ways that really facilitate good learning. And we know that taking short quizzes. I love this one. This is, as I get older, not only is my short-term memory bad, but so is my short-term memory. The initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory to really get consolidation into a cohesive representation of knowledge. In long-term memory, you have to have repetition. An often spaced repetition of knowledge. And it's even better if there is interleaving of topics. So let's say for ABCC, you read an article on treatment of postpartum depression, and you do that correctly, the next article is going to be completely different, right? Then hopefully at some point later on, you're going to go back to another article on postpartum depression and see if you can retrieve that information. But the part of retrieving of the quizzes is you read the article, and then you have the five questions. You have to retrieve what we hope are the key points of the article, and also retrieve that information so that you can use it in a clinical scenario. So we're really trying to create more questions and implementing the knowledge in the article. So having to recall facts and concepts from memory is a much more effective learning strategy than rereading. Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting. So remember using flashcards to learn your multiplication tables. Spot quizzes is the one thing we have incorporated into the ABCC. So using those short five-question quizzes after reading the article is really an effective principle. And you can do this yourself, reading your own articles as you're reading it. What are the key ideas? What are the key points? What are some examples in which I could use this? How do these connect and relate to what I already know? And what might I need to learn for better mastery of this topic? So hopefully, what we're hoping you'll do when you participate in this process, that you'll space out the reading of your articles. You know, you have to read 30 articles in three years. That's a requirement for one certificate. That's not a lot. Just to give you a hint, in obstetrics and gynecology, they read 30 articles in one year. So when psychiatrists complain about, 30 articles in three years, that's 10 articles, and you can't read them. Three years, that's 10 articles in a year. Damn, that's a lot. It's really not in comparison. So hopefully, people won't wait until the end of the three year block to read all their articles. We suspect a lot of people will do that, because it's human nature to procrastinate. But it's better learning if you can space them out. There are 10 different topic areas, and you can choose a maximum of four articles from each topic area. But it's nice, because you're going to read about eating disorders. You're going to read about mood disorders. You're going to read about trauma-related disorders. So hopefully, as you do this, you'll start to learn to anticipate the questions and read the articles more thoughtfully, and kind of be able to be ready to answer those questions. And we're really hoping to focus most of those questions on clinically applying the findings, really making these clinically relevant to you. We have a new, this is one thing that is new in the ABPN, we have a pretty comprehensive DEI statement and action plan. I don't know about if we're going to show that table, but if you want to read it, it's a beautiful DEI statement. Glad to make that available to you. It's on our website. One of the ways this is manifest is that it used to be kind of a question, or curious, or not transparent. How do people get selected to serve on question-writing committees? How do people get to be board directors? And we've made that process much more transparent and much more available to folks out there. So if they're interested, we can tell them how to pursue that interest. We also make a really strong effort to have diversity of all kinds on our question-writing teams. And that's a very important principle, diversity in every way, racial, ethnic, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation. And this way, we write better questions that really address issues like disparities in health care. So that's been a very important initiative on our part. We also have our last two. Every year, we have a Crucial Issues Forum at the headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois. We decide ahead of time what are kind of cutting-edge, important issues or questions that we need to address. The last two Crucial Issues Forums have really been on disparities. One on supporting and promoting women in psychiatry and neurology, and one on supporting and promoting positions for underrepresented groups in medicine. So this is something that is very important to us. There's the, if you want to read the whole statement, it's really on our website and the web page. So nuts and bolts. And this is Dr. Bob Bowman. I believe. Yeah, that's about it. I can talk about this if you're not prepared to. I thought we were doing, doesn't matter, I'll go. You sure? Because I can do this. All right, that's fine. You sure? Yeah. OK, so I'm going to talk a little about just the general characteristics of the thing. This is of the CC program. I mean, it's really so you get the sense of now, what do you have to actually do and stuff. So I mean, obviously the goals are is that we want to do something that's credible, that has high quality, that's convenient, that's reasonable cost, and hopefully it's something that you're all satisfied with, that it's actually useful to you. We have to sort of fulfill the standards of the ABMS. We hope also that we can often fulfill the standards for the medical licensing boards as well, although that's not our goal, and it's not meant to be required for that. Finally, we want to have components that are identified as crucial by organizations, and kind of like help you all sort of get credentials and stuff. At any rate, here are the requirements, in essence, to be board certified. You have to have an unrestricted medical license. You have to do a one-time patient safety activity. You have to take an exam every 10 years, or you have to do the ABCC pathway, which I'm going to describe in more detail, every three years. And then you have to do all the CC activities. What are those? Well, you have to get CME hours. That's what you're doing here at the APA, of course. 21st CME hours of cell, sorry, 90 overall hours, and 21st self-assessment. The APA per three-year block. Thanks. And keep in mind that with that, I mean, there's lots of activities out there to allow you to do that, including at the APA. It offers a self-assessment exam, and I like to take that. You have to annualize, you have to sort of attest that you're doing those activities each year, and of course, pay the fee. The year fee depends on your certification status. If you have one certification, that's $175. If you have 240, sorry, if you have two or more, then that's, you can see how much it goes up a bit. 240 for two, 310 for three. There's no additional fees, so what we've done is we really parsed it out. So in the past, you used to sort of not pay anything for 10 years, and then pay this large amount. Now you're paying the smaller amount per year, and then when you get to the exam at 10 years, if that's what you're taking, you don't have to pay anything. And there's no additional fee for the ABCC pathway as well. There's also ways that you can get some of your self-assessment credits waived. You can complete the ABCC exam. You can also pass a certification or CC exam. That's basically when you start out, so you get a little bit of breathing room after your first cert exam. You can write peer-reviewed publications and attest to that. You can participate in PsychPro, in other words, our registry that we have here through the APA. You can get a grant. You can do formal supervision with feedback, or you can do a formal institutional peer review with feedback. So there's a lot of things you can do. You won't get all your self-assessment covered. You'll get 16 hours, but that's still pretty good. So we did a pilot project. I'm not going to go into detail about that too much since it's already been done, but just to let you know that before we actually started this new ABCC portion, we tried it out, both in psychiatry, child psychiatry, neurology, and child neurology. Did anyone participate in the pilot? Great, great. And basically, it sort of set the structure of what we're going to do. This happened from 2019 to 21, and then we extended it an extra year because of the, you probably don't remember, but there was a pandemic that sort of put everyone a bit behind. So we gave a grace year. And so what it was was that you would read 30 to 40. You had to read 30 journal articles out of 40. You had five multiple-choice questions. It was an online, open-book format that people did. So basically, you'd read the article. Then you'd go online to take the exam, the quiz, basically. You're doing it open-book. It wasn't timed. And you had to get four out of five questions right. So we learned a lot, actually, from that experience because we got to sort of practice it out. And you can imagine, writing open-book questions is a very different skill than writing closed-book questions and things that actually would be meaningful for you that show your knowledge of the articles that you're reading. And people who actually did this were excused from the 10-year CC exam if they read all 30. After, we also got feedback about what people thought of the pilot. And you can see that the feedback here, at least compared to other feedback I get in just about anything else I do, is pretty good. So things like, is the articles easy access? Are they helpful to my practice? Is the test fair? Are the questions well-written? Did I overall have a satisfactory experience with it? And you can see that it was really remarkably high as far as how people scored that. So we kind of felt we were on the right track. And certainly, the verbal feedback that I and others got was that people preferred it to taking the exam. So now I'm going to tell you about where it's going forward from here. This is the article-based certification pathway. I mean, I know it's still something some of us are getting used to, because you have to take this test and stuff. And it's all very hard. And you work very hard to do that. And now, then we started telling you that, no, no, no. But you're not done. You've got to keep doing more things along the way. Why was that? Well, because the whole field has changed, really. I mean, the notion now is that, as doctors, we really have a duty to keep up with the literature and to keep up our own skills. So I'm going to tell you a bit about what we're doing now. So basically, it's the same structure as what I just described for the pilot. For each certification, whether it's general psychiatry or subspecialty, you pick from 10 different content areas. For each area, there's four to six different articles with a maximum of four article assessments that can be taken or scored in any content area. And basically, a diplomat has to answer, with the pilot, four out of five questions correctly to pass that quiz. So basically, we're changing the way we think about this. Instead of doing nothing for 10 years and cram, cram, cram a month or two before the exam, and then taking the exam, passing it, and then forgetting everything because we didn't really spend much time on it, and waiting for another 10 years, we're doing something constantly now, which obviously, I mean, just intuitively, to me, seems like a better way to keep up with things. I mean, I know I like to think that I keep up with all the articles I'm supposed to read anyway. But I have to say that, before this came along, I had this large pile of journals and stuff. And I can't say I spent every day reading them as much as I probably should have. So I need external pressure. I think most of us do, or external motivation to do stuff. This is the overall block. So it's basically, if you're doing the ABCC, it's in blocks of three. So the current three-year block, we get reset. Begins 2022, goes to 2024, and you can do the math. It continues every three years. And by the way, I mean, it's fine taking pictures of this. But all this information is available on our website as well. So it's not hard to get. But feel free. So you have to continue. You have to do all these things successfully, each three-year blocks, which means the article stuff, if you're doing that. Also, the other program activities, pay your fees. And all the active certificates are going to have three-year cycles. And you can download your own certificate. We don't send them out anymore. But it's easy to download. And I'll show you how with that as well. So I mean, like self-assessment and stuff, this all becomes part of the three-year block. So you have to do all these activities during that time, which means your self-assessment, which I described, the CME, performance in practice, article assessments. Most of that we're already used to doing, because that's been true for a long time. Really, the new thing is the articles. And then you get an evaluation that takes place at the end of the three-year period. And you have to only complete those things for your three year to sort of, you have to complete everything within those three years. And then another block continues at the next three years. You can't work ahead. So you can't do lots of articles in the beginning and try to bulk up across like 10 years or something. And a block will be waived for diplomats. So what happens if you've already completed a fellowship? Most of us probably did that a while back. But if you just do a fellowship, you get a waiver of some of the activities, self-assessment, CME, performance in practice, which is great. As far as the articles, those still continue. Why? Because as I said, this is instead of taking a 10-year exam. At this point, we're parsing it out across those years. And you really should need all those years to complete that. So what happens if you have multiple certificates? It's not like you have to keep taking. I mean, you do have to do more articles, but not mathematically more, like 30 more for each one. Because that would be a lot of articles. You get some bonus there. So if you have just your general psychiatry certification, that's 30 articles. Two certificates, it's 50 articles, 20 in each category. So 20 in general, 20 in your subspecialty, and the rest are freebies. Three, it's 70. You can see how it's going up 20 each time. Four, 95 plus certificates. Does anyone have that here? Is that even possible? Oh, my. Anyone? There are people. Oh, my. Well, they're gluttons for punishment, so they won't find this particularly daunting, I think, to just keep reading articles forever. And you have a certain number of temps. So like I said before, like we did in the pilot, you actually have 40 articles to use, of which you have to pass 30. If you have two, you can see the numbers. It's 67 articles, you have to pass 50, 93 to pass 70, 120 to pass 90 as it goes up. It's pretty easy to access all this. It's all online. The links are all on the webpage. So you just put in your information if you register and stuff and do that. And it's nice because it kind of lays out, you know, gives you access to what the articles are and where the tests are. So for instance, this is mine. So I'm boarded and consultation liaison psychiatry, general psychiatry, and geriatric psychiatry. So you can see where this screen is and I can get my articles there. Don't get too nervous. This is an old slide for me. So I've done a few more since then. And then once I, like for instance, I'm going to the CL page, there's just an example here. And you can see all the categories kind of pop up of what category I want to do now. And once you go to one of those categories, it tells you what the articles are. And once you sort of pick one of those articles, you hit that little blue circle over there and it will take you to a description of the article. We don't have the actual articles online. Why don't we? Because if we did, well, that's copyright. We'd have to pay for them. It would make the exam very, very expensive. And we'd all be paying for it, even though a lot of us probably don't need it online. We can get the articles ourselves. And they're actually not that hard to find. I mean, obviously, if you belong to a university, you're going to get it through your university library. If you belong to a specialty society, a lot of the articles in your subspecialty are probably coming from that journal. For instance, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, they're coming from the Orange Journal. Is it still Orange? Yeah. And honestly, and I actually checked. I can get a lot of medical journals from my public library, which I hadn't really realized and stuff. So there's a lot of ways to get this. So the article assessment. So when you get to the end of each CC block, those three years, they're going to assess, did you do the 30 articles? Now it's optional, right? You don't have to do articles. You can still take the exam. So you don't lose your certification if you didn't do them. But you, you know, but you only get the credit for those three things if you do that. Sorry? They told me that once I signed up for the articles, I couldn't go back to the exam. I believe you can change one time, right? Patty's our expert on these things. If I sign up for the articles, I can go back to the exam? You can go back to the exam. Once. Once. People can't go back. They keep going willy-nilly. Right. Exactly. But yeah. So you can change back. And I'm going to say something more about that in just a little bit. All right. And you just sort of continue it. And so you, if you either don't complete it, you get put actually into the exam category. So you don't lose your certification. Or if you're unsuccessful, you just can't, if you don't do it properly, either because you don't complete it or you don't pass enough, then you get put into the exam. Because once again, this is an optional thing. So you don't have to have to do this to stay certified. It's just an option. It's just one way to do it. So how do you become not certified, which is what we always worry about? Well, if you are in the exam category or get put into it because you didn't do the CCs and you fail the exam twice in a 10-year period, or if you don't do the other things that you're supposed to do during that time, self-assessment, CME, performance in practice for a six-year period, even if you pass the exam. So you still have to keep these other things up. And I encourage everyone to kind of do that regularly. Once again, you heard the APA, so that's what you're doing. How do you sign up for this, by the way? Well, you're already signed up if you did nothing. It's the default pathway for everyone here. So easy. But you can, like I said, you can choose not to do it if you want. And you can choose to take the exam instead. And you can actually, and this was kind of new to me a while back, but you can choose different pathways for each of your certifications if you really want to. But you know, I mean, if you don't want to read articles and something. And you're permitted to switch, like they already just said, like one time during it. And you know, if in doubt, refer to the website to kind of keep you up. And I'll say a little bit more about that coming up. And so, I mean, you know, so what's next coming along? I mean, these all are individualized, right, because we're all in different situations. So if you want to know what you need to do to pass, how do you do that? Do you ask your colleagues and your peers? No, I don't think you should, because we all have unique situations. We have different certificates. We got them at different times. We all started at different times and stuff. So I would, I mean, you really should get your information from the ABPN, which means from the webpage and from the Physician's Portal. It used to be the Physician's Folios, but now it's called the Physician's Portal. You can go on there, and they're personalized to each of our needs along the way. So, I mean, it really gets down to the idea that it's kind of overwhelming, like when we go through it, like slide by slide like this. So the real question is, you know, how can we keep this simple? Tell me what I have to do. Well, it's pretty simple. You go to the ABPN webpage, that's abpn.com, and you can see, you know, it's highlighted right at the top, Physician's Portal. You click on that, or you can go down there if you, you know, so if you want to do it a different way, and it'll take you to your portal page. This is mine. And so it kind of tells you everything about your status. And just to zoom in and stuff, I mean, you know, and you also, and you basically along the lines, I mean, you know, and you can also get your certificates. I mean, I know really we do this stuff because we want to learn, right, and we want to be up to date, and we want to do right by our patients. But still, it's kind of nice to get a certificate from all as well. So you can see where your certificate status is on that same page and what your standing is. And you can also, you can see on the bottom, you can download a copy of your certificate as well if you need to. That's about all I'm going to talk about now. And we've left a lot of time for questions, and maybe, Joan, you can come on back up and The same thing again, if you could just come to the mic and stuff. I would just say while she's doing that, my advice is, you know, don't wait until the last minute. It is hard to, you know, you have to read these things to pass the test. It's an open book test, but you still have to know it. So get started. And I mean, everyone kind of makes the rookie error in the beginning of thinking they can just kind of scan it and pass the exams. You can't. You really need to know the exam. And it's probably, the answers for each one is probably not just in the abstract. I mean, it's not, believe me, that we've worked very hard to make the questions fair. It's not meant to be a trick. It's not going to get lost in semantics. But at the same time, you know, you do need to know the article to pass the exam. It should be obvious. But I mean, I've made that mistake, and I think everyone, you know, needs to learn from that as well. You can also give feedback about the questions. We're all human. We're still learning this as we do and stuff. So it's definitely happened that, you know, because you have the articles, you know the questions that you were asked, so you can always come back and sort of complain about it. And we have gotten complaints and stuff of, you know, where they interpreted it differently than we did. And there's some legitimate things. Make use of that. Make use of the feedback. We do read those things, and we have made changes based on that. Every now and then, like, some people say, like, well, that's not really true, and I think you misunderstood the analysis, and I think this is really what it said, and you're like, oh, my gosh, I think they're right. That's another legitimate way to read it. So you know, I mean, you know, you are a part of this all, and so, you know, please let us know if there's something you disagree with. I want to, quick question. We are going to ask that you use the mics and stuff. While you're getting up to the mic, I want to add on to something Bob was talking about, the actual process of taking this exam. The articles, by the way, we keep on the short side. We really like to have them no more than five, six pages and clinically relevant. Some people have made the mistake of clicking on the assessment to take the exam before they've made the article, and then they say, well, maybe I don't want to read that. Now, once you've selected the assessment, you can't unselect it. You've got to take the test. So be sure you access the article first before you click on the test. The other thing is you have as much time as you want to take this. You can read the article over a period of 10 days or two months and then do the assessment. You can take, answer two of the questions, and you get interrupted, you have to go make dinner or feed the dog, come back a week later and finish up the... You can do it in the bathtub. I mean, really, in terms of feasibility, it's... Well, don't bring a computer into your bathtub. No, I wouldn't recommend that if you can reach outside the bathtub, but it's... The nice thing about this is you can do this in your own time, and you can take as long as you want to finish an article and finish the assessment. You can also... It's open book. You can go back, read a question, you say, gee, I'm not sure I got that. You go back and read it in the article. So what's the... Well, that's how you learn. So question. Yeah. Thank you so much. And just to clarify and to make sure that I understood it correctly, so with this system, if someone has a general board and a subspecialty board, previously, they were taking the exams on different times. Now, they are all in the same three-year slot. And with this redistribution... Yes. So for example, I am due for my 10-year recertification in this year, and I'm due for my subspecialty next year. With this new process, now everything is due next year, like with a slot of 2022 to 2024. I'm looking at Patty, and Patty says yes. Can I say yes? Yes. Okay. Thank you. So... She's saying to everyone, check the portal just to be sure. It was a little difficult when we made this transition. There was some compression in time, but I think ultimately, this is going to be so much easier for everyone. Yeah. And you want to be on the same cycle. It would be too hard to keep track of things if you weren't. The other point we didn't bring up is that you can do ABC, the article-based pathway for your, say, your main certification, and decide to take the one-time test for your subspecialty. I kind of said that. But you just said it better. You did. I'm sorry. That's all right. I'm so sorry, Bob. That's quite all right. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. So, my question is, can you comment on PIP, how do you meet that requirement, as well as how do you upload the CME certificate to the website? Right. So, a couple things. With PIP, I'm sorry I didn't go into a lot of detail about that, because it's been around for a bit and stuff, and I was trying to concentrate mainly on new things. There's a lot of performance and practice activities on there, and they divide into sort of two different things. There's sort of self-evaluation type of feedback ones, and also clinical ones. And you can go online to sort of see what those are. What I would sort of just advise, as you think about it, is think about your current job and the things you're doing, and it may well be there are things you're already doing for your hospital that meet the criteria for that. Yeah. Yeah. If you work for a healthcare institution or a hospital, most likely you're getting like a performance plan that you get a report on periodically, annually. And they may be measuring whatever what your patient satisfaction scores are, or whether your patients are getting better or re-hospitalized. That may actually fill the criteria for performance and practice. As far as the CME portion, you're attesting to those things. Right. Right. So you don't necessarily have to put all the certificates on there. I do sometimes use it to keep track of the difference, just of what I've done, so I have a place to save it. But you're attesting. But save evidence of it. Yes. Because they do periodic- Audits. Yeah. We just had a tax season. Everybody does something different. You can actually save your CME on your physician portal through there. I still save things in files on my home computer. I put everything on PDF and save it forever. Because I was audited, not by the EBPN, but by my state medical board. And I wasted a lot of time finding certificates that I knew were somewhere, but I wasn't quite sure where. Thank you. Yeah. Hi. I had a question. How do I know that I'm meeting criteria for a certain time slot? I know that there is a section at the bottom of my folio that says that I'm meeting the criteria. Is that all? Or do I need- what kind of evidence do I need? Yeah. Yeah. It's now called the physician portal. And actually, you'll get- and if you have any questions, you can just- I think Bob showed his page. It showed what he is currently meeting. It will state right on there. And if you need help, I'm going to make a plug for the booth. If you'd like to have some hands-on practice with that, we have a booth that is in 1247 in the exhibit hall. You can go down there at any time during this meeting, and one of the staff will help you access your physician portal and show you exactly where you are. And you see the email stuff. The staff is incredibly responsive if you did have questions and such. Yeah. But a lot of the information is on your portal. All right. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we know that some of this- to us, it's sometimes confusing. So we get it. Yeah. Even as I'm saying it, you can see just listening to it, as you try to sort of say what's true for everyone, it's hard. Yeah. I mean, for me, too. I just go online, and I look. Yeah. And see, what do I got to do? Good afternoon. I just only have comments here, three expressions of gratitude. One, thank you for being here. Two, thank you for your previous presentation when we were last time here in San Francisco, if you recall. The diplomats then were like super anxious. We don't believe you. This is all whatever. It's all a trick. You say anxious, and it's angry. Yeah. And then angry. Exactly. If you remember that time. It's like, oh, this is such a better group here. But we're not wearing our Kevlar vests anymore. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah. You guys were clearly predicting the future. I didn't know that. But thank you for that. Anyway. You've all been very gracious throughout the years about this. And then the last expression of gratitude, let them know your team in Illinois. They're like the best people on the phone. I love them. Oh, so great to hear that. Yeah. They're amazing. I've called them several times over the years, and they're amazing. I don't know their names. All I can just say is that they don't have a classic Midwestern accent. And so if that's helpful for you, they're amazing. And that's all I have to say. They are amazing. They are amazing. We work with them a lot. They're amazing. And I think Patty Vondrack and Jeff Linus will definitely pass that on. Yeah. We can work on the accent if you'd like. Right. I... I just wanted to take a pause and just give an opportunity, if you wanted to say something, Dr. Linus, because as our CEO and stuff, I'm sure there are things that you wish we had emphasized more. Right. Dr. Linus is our new ABPN CEO, and he started officially as the CEO in January, and so this is his first year, and he's still with us, so that's a good sign. Right? It's helping. We want to keep up. I want to say something else. The other thing is, you know, we, there are other stakeholders, public bodies, who, and let's just say governmental bodies, who would be, I think, eager to tell us what we should or must do to stay up to date as physicians. People who aren't physicians would like to tell us. One of the purposes of our board is to make sure that we regulate ourselves and that it's physicians, psychiatrists and neurologists like ourselves, who determine what we need to know and how we want to learn. So we take that responsibility very seriously. Yes. Thank you so very much. My name is Dr. Ade, A-D-E. Hello. Yeah. I became board certified in 2009, and I did a recertification exam in 2020. And I just relaxed. You know, I didn't know that all this would be coming up. You're not that far. That's fine. Okay. Because it looks to be as if recently they've been emailing me and all that. And it seems like in June or July, I will be due for this three-year CC, you know, so and I'm wondering, can I do all these articles in two months, or do I just wait till 2030 and write the recertification exam? Patty, did you get that? It will be due in 2024 now. We should talk and look at your portal. Okay. We'll help you out. Yeah. A July deadline doesn't ring a bell to me. It doesn't shine. Yeah. It doesn't quite sound right. It may be June. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'd like to help you personally if we can. We can look at your account. Okay. All right. Thank you. Sure. All right. Any other questions or thoughts or suggestions? Oh. Well, you know how to reach us. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. If you have article suggestions, too, they're really hard to pick. Yeah. Yeah. Just one quick question. You mentioned, uh, if we're doing the ABCC, they get 16 hours of self-assessment. Yes. We get credit for 16 hours of self-assessment. Yes. Does that just kind of automatically show up, or in the, per? Okay. Okay. Thank you. Well, wait. Uh, you have to attest to it, though, right? Well. It wouldn't necessarily know. Oh, I'm, oh, no. If you do the ABCC. Yeah. I'm sorry. I misunderstood the question. You automatically get 16 self-assessment credits. Yes. Yes. Of course. Yeah. Am I correct in assuming that people who have a lifetime certification do not have any requirement to show that they're keeping up? No, they don't. Okay. So, my husband is in that category. category and I will soon be able to practice as long as he has. Is there any plan of getting me grandfathered at some point after I've done the fifth reassessment exam? Yeah I've been around that in a while too, I get it. No, I mean this was the notion was that like this is a better way to do things and we changed to that. The reason we didn't make everyone do it as a promise is a promise and he had a lifetime certificate so we're not going to take it away. A friend of mine who's an internist said well they did. I understand that but it makes the argument that we're doing this because everybody should keep up. It loses some of its veracity I think when you feel fair or equitable. Correct. However, remember if you know these are folks that were promised that this was a lifetime certificate and you know that's that's a tough thing. It's a tough thing yeah yeah of course tell him that he can voluntarily. Yes. What's so funny? He retired. There are people who there are many people with with lifetime certificates including us who are who actually and there's Dr. Keeper's over there who voluntarily participate in the ABCC. Good afternoon and thank you AVPN for their great effort. I am really appreciative whenever I ask any question I email immediately I got the reply. I have one suggestion. Yes personally I am ready to do lots of CMEs PIPs anything you but just based on five question of an article we are judged and can we not just do the articles and say yes I done it I understand it. Okay. Well you're the learning expert. If you if you participated as I have in ABCC there are a number of times when I have only gotten four out of five and I in that and I think that you know I realized I didn't read carefully enough. I learned from that from not passing that one question so I think it and I thought at the time I got them all right. So the fact is we are not the best judges of our own understanding. That's the whole purpose for independent assessment right. That's just a fact of learning and so having an independent assessment of what we've learned is really important. I would argue too as Joan showed on one of her slides the questions are part of the learning experience so it's not just that we're saying we don't believe you prove it that you did this. I mean we really respect everyone here and we believe in people's honor that they're not gonna lie or anything but at the same time I mean answering questions is one of the best ways to learn something. I agree. Yeah that's why you know you see often in good textbooks there'll be questions after the chapter and that's a really good way to learn. Actually we know that's one of the best ways to learn. Yeah. Thank you. So yeah it's not just assessment we want to help people learn and promote learning. Hi I'm also board certified by another AVMS specialty so when I did my first recertification about 10 years ago I was able to keep up with one specialty and get credit with the second one. Now both both of my boards are going to this and I'm trying to figure out if you adjust for those of us who have to keep up with two very different specialties. Interesting. Right the board energy what she's saying is that each board manages their own assessments. You're talking about another specialty such as internal medicine or each board each AVMS board has certain standards that they have to meet in their assessment their independent assessment. Some boards have a system where they send out text questions via text that you have to answer in real time. So yeah. So will AVPN make allowance for the other board stuff for you guys this is what I have to do regardless of what I'm doing with the other boards that's really what I'm asking about this board. In other words if you answer the pediatrics psych or whatever questions are you exempt from doing psych? I'm from the ABCC. I'm not sure exactly what you're asking at this point but I think the answer is gonna be no but go ahead again. Yeah because the first time I recertified 10 years ago all the AVMS specialties had a reciprocity that you got credit for the work you did and now I'm on continuing certification on both so I can see doing a hundred articles for example because I'm keeping unless there's the same kind I see what you're saying I'm just asking yeah I mean each one has their own standards I don't see how that could even possibly work. Okay. And it's a different content now in knowledge content. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. It makes you feel better when my brother-in-law has to take an exam for every different plane he flies. Is that true? Yeah. It's different certifications. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much.

Continuing Certification Program

Maintenance of Certification

psychiatrists

neurologists

quality care

article-based pathway

CME hours

professional engagement

self-regulated certification

medical field