The American Board of Internal Medicine announces the first ever agreement between a certifying board and IT company to facilitate physician reporting of clinical performance data to meet Maintenance of Certification requirements.
Philadelphia, PA, October 10, 2007 – The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) announces the first ever agreement between a certifying board and IT company to facilitate physician reporting of clinical performance data to meet Maintenance of Certification requirements. ABIM’s agreement with NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: QSII), a leading electronic medical records (EMR) vendor, also will reduce redundant (and wasteful) data collection requirements.
Board certified internists or subspecialists who are enrolled in Maintenance of Certification and complete a specific ABIM PIM Practice Improvement Module® can use the NextGen® EMR system to electronically transmit patient chart information into one of five ABIM modules – Asthma, Diabetes, Preventive Cardiology, Hypertension or Clinical Performance Services. ABIM’s PIMs are Web-based quality improvement tools that allow physicians to analyze and evaluate their performance in practice in order to improve the quality of care they provide.
By using the appropriate NextGen EMR encounter screen, physicians easily collect the relevant clinical information from the various areas of the chart where it is stored. The physician then reviews the information to be sure it is complete, and presses the “submit” button to transmit the data electronically – and securely – to ABIM. This clinical data are used to complete the Self-Evaluation of Practice Performance component of Maintenance of Certification. To participate, physicians must use NextGen EMR with knowledge base model (clinical specialty templates) version 7.3 or higher.
“NextGen is the first of many anticipated agreements with EMR vendors to reduce the burden on physicians of redundant approaches to data collection for quality measurement, and to streamline accurate reporting of clinical data,” said Christine K. Cassel, MD, ABIM’s President and CEO. “We are working towards allowing for ongoing assessment of performance as part of practice, in order to demonstrably improve the quality of patient care – which is a key goal that physicians and the Board share.”