Continuing on the theme of Monday’s blog on driving critical mass, two significant medical certification boards - the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) - have announced their intention to make health IT deployment a standard in their assessment and certification of physician competency.
This is a major announcement, and one more example of stakeholders understanding the importance of health IT and helping to bring health IT to ubiquity. The ABMS certifies more than 750,000 physicians in this country. Its Maintenance of Certification program will incorporate the meaningful use of health IT.
It's worthy to note that the ABMS' six core competencies that the board measures - patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communications skills, professionalism and systems-based practice - are part of the meaningful use criteria that the federal government established for its federal incentive program. This illustrates how closely and carefully HHS and ONC crafted the meaningful use criteria for EHRs.
The FSMB announced that it recognizes that widespread EHR adoption could help improve patient outcomes and assess ongoing clinical competence for medical licensing of physicians.
The importance of the announcements is that health IT is now being tied to competency. When the federal incentive program out of the HITECH Act was implemented last year, there were still a lot of physicians who balked at participation, saying the funding was not enough to get them to deploy EHRs. If funding or CMS penalties don't drive adoption, medical licensing and competency surely will.
These announcements, no doubt, have made David Blumenthal, MD, head of ONC, a happy man. It brings his vision of having health IT adoption be a part of physician professionalism one giant step closer.
