Dongming Zhang, American Board of Pediatrics
One of the primary goals of healthcare certification boards is to assure the public that physicians have undergone the appropriate training and credentialing processes, based on the type and level of medical care they are offering patients. These comprehensive processes ensure the integrity of specialty medical care and help patients make educated decisions as they are evaluating and selecting physicians to turn to, for care.
One of those organizations is the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP). The ABP concentrates on optimizing healthcare for infants, children, adolescents and young adults, requiring that pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists complete accredited training and fulfill continuous evaluation requirements in connection with six core competencies: patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communications skills, professionalism and system-based practice.
Everyone benefits as we work together to build a comprehensive standards framework to resolve industry-wide issues and challenges, and support health professions learners and educators.
MedBiquitous is a valuable resource for the ABP, offering research-based standards, business best practices, and innovative solutions to help them achieve their mission, vision and goals. MedBiquitous membership has given the ABP leaders opportunities to be actively involved in the process of developing and implementing standards to track pediatric training and certification activities. Additionally, it’s opened doors for members of the ABP team to work collaboratively with colleagues from other organizations with similar charters, opportunities and challenges.
There are three MedBiquitous standards that have been instrumental to the ABP’s ongoing progress, as it strives to advance the science, education, study and practice of pediatrics. Healthcare Learning Object Metadata (Healthcare LOM), the MedBiquitous Professional Profile and the MedBiquitous Activity Report have proven to be valuable as ABP works to track progress in performance improvement and self-assessment modules with its partners. These tools have helped to streamline communication and data exchange with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME). They have also allowed the ABP to collaborate with other certifying boards to provide shared access to Maintenance of Certification (MOC) activities and seamless tracking of learner participation in activities meeting MOC requirements. In addition, the MOCAM system offered by the ABP is using MedBiquitous standards in tracking credits awarded for involvement in quality improvement or performance improvement activities.
The ABP has been a member of MedBiquitous since its founding, according to Dongming Zhang, Vice President of Information Technology and Informatics at the ABP.
“MedBiquitous brings professionals from medical and healthcare associations, universities, industry and government agencies together,” said Zhang. “Everyone benefits as we work together to build a comprehensive standards framework to resolve industry-wide challenges, and support health professions learners and educators.”