The announcement was made Sept. 23, 2009. The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) had approved a “pilot program” for Recognition of Focused Practice (RFP) in Hospital Medicine. ABMS-sanctioned board certification for hospitalists had finally arrived.
When the announcement came, I was at the University of California at San Francisco’s CME conference with 600 other hospitalists. Robert Wachter, MD, FHM, chief of the hospital medicine division, professor, and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, a former SHM president, and author of the blog Wachter’s World, announced the RFP in HM to the audience—it received resounding applause. Dr. Wachter, the UCSF conference chair, then went on to recap the history behind RFP and how we got here. As he spoke, I realized that I had forgotten how long this process had taken and how much work had been done by so many people.
To practicing hospitalists, the creation of some sort of certification in HM seems like the proverbial no-brainer. But think about it from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) perspective: All “specialties” with board certification have training programs or fellowships that help define them. We do not have hospitalist residency programs or fellowships that are necessary for practicing as a hospitalist. Our expertise is acquired during practice.
So if the training path for hospitalists is not different—at least for now—from that of other general internists, how do we create board certification? When a group, such as hospitalists, “asks” to be recognized as a specialty with their own certification, the ABIM needs to consider the implications of creating such recognition. For hospitalists, the question was: If we do this for hospitalists, do we have to create a certificate for officists or outpatient physicians? For the broader questions around recognition of focused practice, the board needed to ask, “What if a group comes forward and asks for recognition of their focus and expertise in caring for diabetes or sepsis?”
ABIM thought very carefully about these questions. For the latter, ABIM says the field asking for recognition of focused practice must have a lot of physicians who only practice in this field while also having large numbers of physicians who never practice in the field. And they said, “Yes, if we do this for hospitalists, we will ultimately need to create a similar pathway for outpatient physicians.” Fortunately for us, they did not wait for RFP in outpatient medicine to be developed before proceeding with RFP for HM. (Figuring out how to do this on the outpatient side is even harder, and even though ABIM has been very supportive of RFP for hospitalists, the ABMS, which oversees all the specialty boards, still had to sign off on this approach. In September, they did.)
RFP Formula
So what will RFP in HM look like? The process is described on ABIM’s Web site (www.abim.org/news/news/focused-practice-hospital-medicine-qa.aspx), but to qualify, a hospitalist must:
- Be certified in internal medicine;
- Have practiced for a sufficient period of time to have achieved certain volume thresholds for patients with inpatient diagnoses;
- Participate in hospitalist-based practice improvement and self-assessment modules; and
- Pass a secure exam, which SHM president-elect Jeff Wiese, MD, FHM, and his committee have been hard at work in creating.