Breadcrumb trail:
Maintaining Your Certification
How to Maintain Your Certification
If you’re maintaining your Internal Medicine certification, please check your ABIM Physician Portal to familiarize yourself with your Maintenance of Certification (MOC) requirements and due dates.
Good news! For every successful year of accredited fellowship you complete satisfactorily, you will earn 20 MOC points.
- To stay “Certified, Participating in MOC,” earn 100 MOC points every five years.
- In 10 years, you must pass an MOC assessment, which can be the traditional, 10-year MOC exam, the Longitudinal Knowledge Assessment (LKA®), or a Collaborative Maintenance Pathway assessment (available in cardiovascular disease and cardiology subspecialties).
Important Tip
- Earning a subspecialty certification earns you 100 MOC points, which is enough to satisfy your five-year requirement. The MOC points you earn count toward all of your certifications.
Fellowship Credit
ABIM recognizes fellowship training as an important part of lifelong learning and continuous professional development.
For each year that a physician successfully completes accredited* fellowship training in an ABIM subspecialty, they earn 20 MOC points. Annual MOC fees are waived for any year during which a physician is in accredited fellowship training in an ABIM subspecialty.
Unaccredited training or training in a non-ABIM subspecialty does not qualify. Please contact your program director to verify if your training is accredited.
How the fellowship fee waiver works:
*Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), or training completed in Canada that has been accredited by either the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada or the Collège des médecins du Québec.
