Certification Activities to Promote Improvements in Health Equity

ABFM has added several new options focused on Health Equity that allow you to meet certification requirements while increasing your knowledge and improving care in your practice.

For Knowledge Self-Assessment, ABFM worked with the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) to develop the new Health Equity: Leading the Change assessment activity. The activity includes five (5) new modules aimed at helping physicians improve their knowledge of Health Equity, Social Determinants of Health, Supporting Vulnerable Populations, Championing Economics and Policy to Reduce Health Disparities, and Understanding the Impact of Climate Change on Population Health. Now available through the AAFP website, completion of each module will provide 2.5 points toward ABFM certification. This activity is currently only available to ABFM Diplomates who are AAFP members. CME may also be claimed through AAFP.

In August 2021, ABFM made changes to several Performance Improvement (PI) options to add a dimension of health equity to existing activities. Questions were added to 13 PI activities to provide the option for physicians to stratify the measures they use for their PI efforts by race/ethnicity in order to assess whether disparities exist and to begin to address those.

We also added the Health Disparities/Equity Self-Directed Clinical PI, described in the President’s Message, to allow family physicians to tailor their approach to reducing health disparities in a way that is most relevant to their specific practice or community needs.  By utilizing this performance improvement approach, a physician, or group of physicians, can address many different dimensions of care and scopes of practice.