Press Releases
BackAmerican Board of Internal Medicine Endorses the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's (IHI) Five Million Lives Patient Safety Campaign, Opens Maintenance of Certification to Campaign Data
Philadelphia, PA, December 12, 2006 – The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) has formally endorsed the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Five Million Lives Campaign, an aggressive patient safety initiative that aims to eliminate five million needless hospital injuries or deaths in the next two years. As part of that, ABIM has agreed to accept safety-related measurement data collected by hospitals involved in the Campaign, so that physicians actively involved in the Campaign in those hospitals can receive credit toward the practice performance requirement of Maintenance of Certification – a program of ongoing learning and performance assessment required to maintain board Certification.
"ABIM is pleased to add our voice to support for IHI’s very important work to make patient care safer and more patient-centered,” said Christine Cassel, MD, ABIM’s president and CEO. “By allowing internists to use data collected by hospitals to maintain their Board certificate, ABIM hopes to make it easier and more rewarding for physicians to actively participate in the Campaign"
ABIM has aligned its efforts to enhance quality of care with the goals of the Campaign to help accelerate improvement efforts as hospitals create and sustain reliable systems of care, and to minimize redundant data collection which adds burden to physicians’ lives, but adds no value to patient care. ABIM is committed to enhancing health care quality, and looks forward to continued work with IHI and other stakeholders to build a safe and effective health care delivery system – one that provides the high quality of medical care that every patient deserves.
About ABIM
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is an independent, not-for-profit organization that grants board certification—a well accepted marker of physician quality—to internists and subspecialists. Certification is a rigorous, comprehensive program for evaluating physician knowledge, skills and attitudes to assure both patients and payers that a physician has achieved competence for practice in a given field. Individual physician certification results may be found at www.abim.org.
