It's Time to End the MOC® Brand

After Monday's resounding AMA resolution calling for an end to Maintenance of Certification®, it is time to end, once and for all, the MOC® brand held by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS).

Maintenance of Certification® remains as a failed social justice experiment foisted on unsuspecting and vulnerable practicing US physicians by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the ABMS solely for the dual purposes of financial and political gain. Multiple studies have demonstrated MOC's inability to improve patient care or quality while wasting valuable time and physicians resources to fund this illegal experimentation.  After secretly lifting at least $55 million in diplomate fees to form the ABIM Foundation, MOC® has become the poster child for financial malfeasance, corporate cronyism, conflicts of interest, and fraud.  In all my years of practicing medicine, I have never seen such an egregious violation of medical ethics levied on practicing physicians by some of our own.

Yet MOC lives on in the hearts and minds of the AMA and affiliates of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). From the AMA press release after Monday's passage of the anti-MOC® resolution, it seems the AMA still thinks MOC® is a good idea:

Asking the American Board of Medical Specialties to encourage its member boards to review their MOC policies regarding the requirements for maintaining underlying primary or initial specialty board certification in addition to subspecialty board certification to allow physicians the option to focus on MOC activities most relevant to their practices

At the same time in an apparent attempt to render MOC® life support, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) has recently begun co-branding CME with MOC®.  They've even produced a new logo (they call it a "badge" - seen above) for sympathetic training organizations and medical schools to download. It all amounts to brainwashing our youngest and most vulnerable physician professionals that the behavior demonstrated by the ABIM and the ABMS should not only be condoned but promoted.

Practicing physicians have spoken loud and clear about their feelings about the ABMS/ABIM MOC® program.  It's time to end it, all of it, and expunge this horror story from the practice of medicine.

-Wes