MOC

[Eye3md]

I know this is NOT financial related but it is a complete waste of money!

 

I just received notification:  "Thank you for paying your MOC annual fee on ABOP.org. Fees paid to the American Board of Ophthalmology are not tax deductible as charitable contributions; however, they may be tax deductible under other provisions of the Internal Revenue Code."

 

This is such a racket and sucks money (and more importantly time) away from us with absolutely NO benefit to us or our patients.

 

Sorry, I just had to vent.

[lost]

Agree w venting. Hopefully, a competition to ABMS opens up soon. But, it is tax deductible as business expense.....if you are owner of a business.

[Hatton]

Charitable contributions...FUNNY

[Zaphod]

lost wrote:

Agree w venting. Hopefully, a competition to ABMS opens up soon. But, it is tax deductible as business expense…..if you are owner of a business.

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ABMS and board certification need to just go away. Strengthen USMLEs, residency and licensing. There is zero reason for boards to exist in the first place. Any competitor will simply bide time til their market share is higher and like any organization look to increase revenue from their captive members.

 

[lost]

Zaphod wrote:

lost wrote:

Agree w venting. Hopefully, a competition to ABMS opens up soon. But, it is tax deductible as business expense…..if you are owner of a business.

Click to expand…

ABMS and board certification need to just go away. Strengthen USMLEs, residency and licensing. There is zero reason for boards to exist in the first place. Any competitor will simply bide time til their market share is higher and like any organization look to increase revenue from their captive members.

 

Click to expand...

Easy to say......hard to do......being practical is more efficient than being near perfect.

[Zaphod]

lost wrote:

Zaphod wrote:

lost wrote:

Agree w venting. Hopefully, a competition to ABMS opens up soon. But, it is tax deductible as business expense…..if you are owner of a business.

Click to expand…

ABMS and board certification need to just go away. Strengthen USMLEs, residency and licensing. There is zero reason for boards to exist in the first place. Any competitor will simply bide time til their market share is higher and like any organization look to increase revenue from their captive members.

 

Click to expand…

Easy to say……hard to do……being practical is more efficient than being near perfect.

Click to expand...

Maybe hard to get a lot of doctors to do simultaneously since its like herding cats, and when you tell us to take a test we respond by saying, 'where do i sign'.

Stop paying and joining en masse and these groups that have so much perceived power will cease to exist, and no one will care about board certification because there wont be a board. We've become slaves to some company that is dependent on us for survival, its nuts. Rationalizing all these little annoyances as practical has got us to this crappy place were in today. Once they disintermediate the physician as biller, our days are done. Theyre working on it.

[Eye3md]

We already have to do CME every year, to stay "up to date".  These MOC exams add zero value.

 

In in my specialty, ophthalmology, it amuses me they established that if you were board certified before a certain year (I believe it is 1992) then you never have to recertify. You are immune to the MOC virus. So, the purpose of the recertification is to "maintain a standard and protect the public" yet a large majority of practicing doc's do not even have to take the worthless exam. Such a load of BS. I would feel like the $1500 exam fee was more useful if I simply threw the money in the fireplace to heat my home

[janettebournes]

I've stopped all donations to my specialty's largest professional organization until they make MOC more reasonable (I'm even willing to bend and pay the exorbitant testing fees. But don't march me to a centralized testing center and make me take an in-person exam again like a resident...)

I let the leadership know it as well when they keep calling to ask why the annual 5 digit checks I used to cut them have disappeared

[lost]

Consider Joining NBPAS, reasonable fee and no testing, just CME credits. Hopefully, accreditation gets nationalized approval so ABIM/ABMS comes to an end.

[Zaphod]

janettebournes wrote:

I’ve stopped all donations to my specialty’s largest professional organization until they make MOC more reasonable (I’m even willing to bend and pay the exorbitant testing fees. But don’t march me to a centralized testing center and make me take an in-person exam again like a resident…)

I let the leadership know it as well when they keep calling to ask why the annual 5 digit checks I used to cut them have disappeared

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You dont like being treated like an inmate while taking an exam? Just let me have my coffee, its boring enough to just mindlessly try to guess which decade the question writer is from before they take the coffee.

[Zaphod]

lost wrote:

Consider Joining NBPAS, reasonable fee and no testing, just CME credits. Hopefully, accreditation gets nationalized approval so ABIM/ABMS comes to an end.

Click to expand...

Just another useless board that will become onerous given enough market share and decades of existing. Why do we need boards? What function do they serve outside of self congratulation?

[Lithium]

I am part of NBPAS because work pays for it, and it's a nice symbolic FU, but I agree it is pretty useless.  They want to replace ABMS certification, yet you have to pass the initial ABMS certification to join.  If you were a payer, hospital CEO, or Congressman, who do you think has the better argument for being the arbiter of board certification?

NBPAS - "We agree with making ABMS initial board exams the standard for board certification, but their ongoing assessments are onerous and unnecessary."

ABMS - "We create the board exams, and we know that their quality as a metric for competence and excellence diminishes over time.  Our exams are only designed to demonstrate that a physician meets these standards in the brief period after they are taken, and excellence can only be demonstrated in the future if assessments are a continuous component of certification."

In reality, the problem goes even deeper than that.  Payers are credentialed by an organization called NCQA, which is run by a woman with a master's degree who is also paid $700k as a member of the ABMS Board of Directors.  Want to guess what happens if payers stop requiring board certification?  They risk losing their credentialing.  So this isn't going away as long as we rely on third party payers to write us our checks.  I don't know if that's a violation of anti-trust law, but the system is absolutely stacked against physicians getting it fixed.  It could be fixed at the legislative level, but the ABMS industrial complex can fight this around the clock with much deeper financial resources and lobbying power than physicians who are already working and taking call.  It will take enormous external pressure (more docs quitting medicine or refusing to take insurance) to turn the tide.

 

[Eye3md]

That's very disheartening, to say the least.

[Zaphod]

Lithium wrote:

I am part of NBPAS because work pays for it, and it’s a nice symbolic FU, but I agree it is pretty useless.  They want to replace ABMS certification, yet you have to pass the initial ABMS certification to join.  If you were a payer, hospital CEO, or Congressman, who do you think has the better argument for being the arbiter of board certification?

NBPAS – “We agree with making ABMS initial board exams the standard for board certification, but their ongoing assessments are onerous and unnecessary.”

ABMS – “We create the board exams, and we know that their quality as a metric for competence and excellence diminishes over time.  Our exams are only designed to demonstrate that a physician meets these standards in the brief period after they are taken, and excellence can only be demonstrated in the future if assessments are a continuous component of certification.”

In reality, the problem goes even deeper than that.  Payers are credentialed by an organization called NCQA, which is run by a woman with a master’s degree who is also paid $700k as a member of the ABMS Board of Directors.  Want to guess what happens if payers stop requiring board certification?  They risk losing their credentialing.  So this isn’t going away as long as we rely on third party payers to write us our checks.  I don’t know if that’s a violation of anti-trust law, but the system is absolutely stacked against physicians getting it fixed.  It could be fixed at the legislative level, but the ABMS industrial complex can fight this around the clock with much deeper financial resources and lobbying power than physicians who are already working and taking call.  It will take enormous external pressure (more docs quitting medicine or refusing to take insurance) to turn the tide.

 

Click to expand...

Again, thats a problem with trying to mobilize physicians. Even in the payer space, we are the biller, so we hold the power, every last drop of it. Yet we've allowed ourselves, the person with all the power in the relationship to be the one controlled. Insurance executives must think it a great irony.

I've heard about this BC part for getting paid, its not universal, and could be seen as right to practice, access, etc...Not an easy fight by any means individually, but in the end, I dont think insurance companies care, someone just paid to have them do that. If there wasnt a deep pocketed board, that wouldnt be an issue either.

Just hate that medicine is in such a state. Dont know if I could stomach actually studying so much for something Im not interested in or care about, but it would be a funny exercise to take the written exam for every specialty to show what a joke it is overall.

[Eye3md]

For ophthalmology, we have to take the recertification test every ten years.  Just like the others here, it requires going to a testing center and answering questions on a computer while being monitored like we are in high school.

 

But, in between this test, every ten years, we also have to do these stupid chart reviews.  I have to randomly pull charts, get on the computer, and check the boxes to show I have done a quality review.  It takes a lot of (wasted) time and I have to pay the ABOP for the "privilige" to do this twice every ten years.  I also have to take a few "minor" test before I take the "big" test.  Again, I get to pay the ABOP for this privilige.

 

Its like EHR, if it actually did something to improve my ability to care for my patients, I would be all for it.  But, the recertification process is an absolutely worthless scam set up by the powers that be