Congratulations.

Your individual efforts paired with SCAI’s advocacy have convinced ABIM to further modify its Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program.

Just yesterday the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) announced a collaboration so physicians can receive MOC credit for traditional CME activities they are already doing.

SCAI has been aggressively lobbying ABIM over the past 2 years to change its MOC program.  This is the second announcement in a month addressing two issues we all felt very important to interventional cardiology, following the July announcement addressing the need to recertify via examination only in one’s primary sub specialty.

ABIM's most recent announcement further addresses/satisfies the fourth of SCAI’s four priorities for change:

• Streamlining recertification for tertiary subspecialists, which previously required interventional cardiologists and other subspecialists to re-take and pass multiple examinations.
• Eliminating punitive labels from the ABIM website, such as “not meeting MOC requirements.”
• Changing Part IV MOC requirements.  (ABIM has suspended Part IV for 2 years and plans to revamp the requirements.)
• Accepting different types of traditional CME as counting for MOC requirements.

Continued clarification is in order as to how this will indeed transpire. We are expecting that you will be hearing further announcements from the ABIM on the points above as they begin to announce specifics on how they will be enacting these changes. Now is the time where we must be most vigilant. As THE Voice for Interventional Cardiology, SCAI will continue to review these details to make sure ABIM stays true to its promises. To date, ABIM has heard our concerns and responded. We also encourage you to stay engaged on the issue.

Again, congratulations. SCAI is pleased to be your representation for Interventional Cardiology concerns. This is another instance where the voice of  Interventional Cardiology was clearly heard . Working together, we will continue to move forward to represent our members and our field for the betterment of our patients.