Monday, January 13, 2020

The Study We Weren't Supposed to See

Most US physicians are well-acquainted with the American Board if Internal Medicine's (ABIM) breathless claims of ABIM board certification and Maintenance of Certification's benefits. These have included:
  • The Public Expects It
  • Physicians Value It
  • Amount of clinical experience does not necessarily lead to better outcomes or improvement of skills
  • Certification is Associated with Better Care
But what about the harms of constant testing and its affects on physician burnout? Wouldn't it important for the ABIM to mention that their OWN study on 34 subjects, funded by US physician testing fees in the form of grants from the ABIM Foundation and authored (in part) by ABIM staff and consultants, has found that Certification and MOC:
  • "lead to higher measures of depersonalization and emotional exhaustion."
  • "may be an important source of medical errors related to clinical reasoning tasks in practice."
  • yet are considered the "Gold Standard of physician performance."

These are their words, not mine.

Where are these results published on the ABIM or ABIM Foundation website?

Shouldn't U.S. physicians who paid for such poorly conducted/self-promotional "research" be entitled to disclosure of (1) how much granbt money was paid to USUHS, (2) why the funding agency was allowed authorship of this "research," and (3) why the data contained in this work were not disclosed to ABIM diplomates on the ABIM website?

-Wes

Please contribute to help support the legal effort to end Maintenance of Certification nationwide.

5 comments:

Hypocrisy in Action said...

ABMS MOC, the Lucrative Prime Source Verification Service for Burnout

Where's the warning label concerning burnout?

"Caution, MOC has been known to inflict grave harm on 980 thousand BE/BC study subjects."

Anonymous said...

I looked for this study. Nothing comes up on the ABIM or ABIM Foundation website when doing a search for this research. It looks like it was primarily conducted at the Department of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD.

Apparently, Chris Cassel, Richard Baron, Bob Wachter, board officers and trustees, along with the ABMS' own Dutch longitudinal assessment propagandist, Cees van der Vleuten, scrubbed this data clean.

Why? Because the "outcomes" and "data" were not in line with their deceitful propaganda.

They set out to prove two hypotheses and ended up proving something else, the obvious fact that MOC (longitudinal assessment) does serious harm. ABMS (and associates') MCQ's are evidently quite detrimental to a physician's health and well being. MOC and the perpetual assessment machinery of the ABMS harms physicians and their patients.

You can say they shot themselves not just in the foot, but in the head with this study. In the foot, because of the results, and in the head because they chose to bury it.

Cover-up after cover-up about the harms of MOC said...

Condescending Laputans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa

ABMS has NO regard for the public or the profession's health and well being. This is becoming more and more apparent. Otherwise they would have ended MOC immediately as the AMA House of Delegates so resolved a few years ago.

ABMS states below their intention of maintaining a policy of continuous harm in order to hold on to their MOC revenues. Interesting that the carefully worded PR does not admit that MOC contributes to burnout; their communications executives and legal counsel state only that the continuing certification process is "viewed" as a contributor to burnout.

"Recognizing that the continuing certification process is viewed as a contributor to physician burnout, ABMS is dedicated to making the continuing certification process more relevant and less burdensome." - ABMS

https://www.abms.org/news-events/abms-statement-on-commitment-to-clinician-well-being/

ABMS' well-crafted newspeak about their commitment to physician well-being is both sickening and infuriating.

MOC HARMS said...

It is a fair, albeit nefarious, bet that the ABMS has known for years (from their twisted studies, experiments and feedback) that they helped create burnout conditions, and now are using burnout as a further means of manipulating physicians further.

Why? To collect, analyze and sell even more physician data. These greedy ABMS executives want to line their already obscenely rich pockets and enhance the bottom lines of their partners.

ABMS knew the harms they were doing and held it back, just like big tobacco.
http://drwes.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-abim-and-big-tobacco-love-story.html

Anonymous said...

Baseball will fire and ban the cheaters who taint the game but the ABIM and ABMS cannot and will not police themselves. It's a shame when sports will hold themselves to a higher integrity and virtue then the AMA, ABIM and ABMS leadership.