USE RECENT QI PROJECTS TO MEET CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS

To meet maintenance of certification (MOC) requirements, physicians periodically need to do a Performance Improvement (PI) project for the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), or a similar project for the American Osteopathic Board of Family Physicians. Instead of facing that with dread, look at the recent projects you’ve done in your practice. Changes to the MOC process now allow many common quality improvement (QI) projects to qualify as a PI project through ABFM’s self-directed path.¹

For example, did you change the way you gave flu shots this year to miss fewer opportunities? Did you track no-shows for a few weeks and change a process to reduce them? Did you use artificial intelligence to write a patient questionnaire about adherence to home blood pressure monitoring and experiment with using it to improve hypertension care? Collecting a small amount of data about your QI effort is essentially a mini Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. Most family physicians regularly tweak things in their practice and are just one tiny step away from an acceptable PI project.

Even if you don’t need to do this for MOC purposes, make sure you are talking to your team about what needs improving. This shows good leadership, encourages staff creativity and buy-in, and might lead to a process improvement idea you hadn’t considered.

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