The chair of the Continuous Professional Development Committee (CPD) is Audrey B. Uknis, MD, associate professor of medicine at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
“We’re responsible for developing programs and products that interface with the American Board of Internal Medicine’s [ABIM’s] Maintenance of Certification [MOC] program,” explains Dr. Uknis. “These programs have multiple cross-purposes; they allow ACR members to get MOC credits, and they meet the needs of the education committee itself by providing information on what’s needed in continuous education.”
She adds that her committee’s work has been “a real multidisciplinary effort on the part of the ACR to meet the needs of members who are involved in practice or education, and keep everyone current; meet their CME needs, recertification needs, and training needs; and disseminate quality-of-care standards.”
A new product from the CPD debuted in March of this year: a practice improvement module (PIM) called Assess, Improve, Measure (AIM).
“This is a continuous quality-improvement program where we’ll examine practice habits with respect to specific guidelines so a practice can see how well it adheres to those guidelines,” says Dr. Uknis. AIM is a Web-based data-collection tool that generates a report telling the practitioner how often things were done. “The practitioner can then determine how to do things better, whether it’s incorporating a reminder to do something, using a new form for patients to fill out, or finding a new way to schedule or communicate,” explains Dr. Uknis. “The practice has 14 days to enter data from 25 patient records. Once they get their report, they have six months to make any changes, and then they re-survey the patient data to see how they’re doing.”
At that point, the program is officially complete, but the same practice can repeat AIM, with the same guidelines or different ones. “The guidelines topic for 2006 is rheumatoid arthritis,” says Dr. Uknis. Next year, the ACR will release a PIM on gout. Practices that want to repeat AIM can build on their existing data.
“Eventually, this data will be benchmarked for practices around the country and you can see how your practice measures up to similar practices,” says Dr. Uknis.
The CPD is also responsible for the Board Re-Certification Course, a case-based topic review using cases provided by ABIM. “Participants will get a clear view of what types of cases and topics the ABIM is interested in,” says Dr. Uknis. “Participants get ABIM MOC and CME credits for the course.”