Office of Medical Education

American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) – 4 Components

• What are the 4 components of ABMS Credit?
  • • Professionalism
      • Professionalism is a shared value across the ABMS Member Boards and foundational to all other requirements of continuing certification.
      • You can meet this requirement by adhering to your board’s principles of professionalismand by holding a current, valid, and unrestricted license to practice medicine.
    • Lifelong Learning
      • With a combination of self-assessment, Continuing Medical Education (CME), and other practice relevant activities, this aspect of continuing certification helps keep you on track and learning throughout your career.
    • Assessment
      • Assessment measures the knowledge that sets you, as a board certified practitioner, apart from non-physicians and other non-certified medical practitioners with less training and experience. It shows that you are up to date and aware of best practices in your specialty.
      • Fulfill the assessment component by:
        • Participating in a regular program (longitudinal/article based and customized to practice)
        • Meeting the performance standard on a continuous cycle set by your board
      • Improvement
        • Demonstrate that you can reflectively look at your practice and identify opportunities to improve care or the process of care delivery. Fulfill this component by designing an intervention for improvement, and then apply simple measures and timeframes to those improvements and document their impact.

Depending on the conference, we are allowed to transmit credit for American Board of Anesthesiology (ABA), American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), American Board of Otolaryngology (ABOHNS), American Board of Pathology (ABPath), American Board of Pediatrics (ABP), American Board of Surgery (ABS), and American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (ABOS).

At the beginning of any accredited conference, there will be a set of slides shown to indicate that the activity has been certified. There will also be an evaluation or testing component to verify completion.

CME for Maintenance of Certification Program Guide 

What are the evaluation requirements?

• Evaluations can not be anonymous for MOC credit. They have to be tied to individuals in order to confirm credit eligibility.