ABIM and the ABIM Foundation: Consumer Fraud?

Early Tuesday morning I attended an excellent continuing educational video-conference hosted by Paul Friedman, MD at the Mayo Clinic at our institution. Anyone who knows Paul knows what an excellent educator and mentor he has become for electrophysiologists around the world. The case involved patient that was a CRT failure, the workup of that condition, the decisions made, and how they handled the case using His bundle pacing, with some pearls about that physiology. I attended the conference voluntarily and without coercion because of the excellent educational value it provides me yet I received no continuing medical education credit (CME) or ABMS Maintenance of Certification (MOC®) credit for doing so.

Because I wasn't scheduled to start a case after that, I then attended a lecture on pulmonary hypertension and its management delivered by one of our cardiology fellows. That lecture was  sanctioned by the University of Chicago as qualifying for CME credit, but not MOC. It, too, was excellent, and refreshed my understanding of the various oral and intravenous therapies available to treat this disorder. I then traveled to another hospital to perform three procedures.

ABIM Website - Click to enlarge

Later that day between cases, I had a colleague who has been forced to re-certify in April of this year and perform MOC® modules lest he lose his credentials to practice at our hospital, look up my publicly available information on the ABIM website for me, and there I was: certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and Cardiac Electrophysiology, but not participating in MOC®.

I know most of the long-time readers of this blog are probably thinking that I should wear that "Not Participating in MOC" designation as a badge of honor, but I look at this very differently.

This designation on their website does not include my CME credits (which the ABIM co-brands with their MOC product) and suggests to the public that I "don't keep up" in my field. By co-branding MOC® with CME, they suggest they are equivalent, but they clearly are not. Not participating in certain CME offerings can't remove me or my partner from my job, but not participating in MOC® can. And if MOC is so important to the ABIM and its corporate cronies in the ACGME heirarchy (inlcuding the powerful hospital and ABMS lobbyists), how am I advertised as "certified" yet not participating in MOC®? This is confusing to the public and makes no sense, particularly when we see the fighting going on at the state legislative level over the "need" for forced "continuous education" of physicians.

Yesterday, I was also tipped to this (seen at the right): an event hosted by the Jewish

Health Activist Network Announcement
(Click to enlarge)

Healthcare Foundation entitled "Spreading and Sustaining the Choosing Wisely Campaign" to be held on Thursday, April 12, 2018 from 5:30PM to 7:30PM in Pittsburgh, PA. The ABIM Foundation's Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Daniel Wolfson is the keynote speaker. "Following his comments, Mr. Mark DeRubeis, CEO of the Premier Medical Associates, and Mr. Jim Coslow, Director of Value Based Care, will share how - and why now - Premier has embraced Choosing Wisely."

We must recall that the ABIM has no money on paper, and all of their remaining assets reside with the ABIM Foundation who is speaking and promoting their marketing campaign at our expense at this program. All of their funds come from working physicians' certification and re-certification fees (with the exception of a few grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). The ABIM Foundation has nothing to do with physician certification, as evidenced by this notice. They have a different mission than assuring physician competence - rather, to promote the next physician payment model of value-based care for themselves.

The ABIM does not place our continuing education credits on their website, yet lists us as not participating in MOC. They call me "certified" publicly on their website, yet the ABIM and my hospital consider my colleague somehow less qualified because he didn't participate in MOC® and pay his money, but are more than happy to continue billing on his behalf in the meantime. Through regulatory capture, the ABIM forces my colleague to take the ABIM MOC® test in April, while not forcing me to do the same and promoting me as "certified" on their website. If my colleague should fail (he won't, just speculating), then me and my colleagues would have to manage his patients and take call more frequently when he is removed from our staff. In effect, there is a multiplier effect if one doctor doesn't recertify on other physicians.

I know this is a strong statement, but given these realities and given what I know about the ABIM Foundation (especially how it received its funds) and its financial shenannigans that include the purchase of a multi-million dollar personal condominium, off-shoring of funds to the Cayman Islands, its many public tax filing discrepancies, I believe the ABIM and ABIM Foundation are engaging in consumer fraud when they post my MOC® status as they do and claim recertification is about physicians "keeping up." As others are noticing, their monopoly on this lucrative product  should not allow them to be qualified tax-exempt organization either.

I believe MOC® is a shell game that deceives the public about the quality of their physicians on a massive scale. It's time to just say no.

-Wes