President’s Message: Improving What’s Important To You – Value and Experience with Board Certification

The American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) is committed to continuous quality improvement and a key part of this in 2024 is improving your experience. While our primary role as a certifying board is to assess competence for family physicians rigorously, it is also important to do it well.

To achieve this goal, we have been busy this past year seeking family physician input and feedback on new ways to improve your experience with board certification so that it results in something that you value as a busy family physician. We have heard that reducing burden, saving time and money, and ensuring certification activities are meaningful and relevant, are all key to ensuring that certification is valuable to you.

Starting with certification activities, I am excited to share that you will see several enhancements designed to improve your experience later this spring. To save you time, we will be introducing an enhanced Knowledge Self-Assessment user platform that will be more current, intuitive, and easier to use. And for those of you who would prefer to keep up with your certification “on the go,” you will begin to have more options to access your MyABFM Portfolio through the new MyABFM Portfolio mobile app.

To help you promote your certificate and ongoing commitment to maintaining certification, you will be able to claim a digital certificate and badge, that you can share with the public and to your own network of colleagues through social media. Additionally, we will offer “Text Messaging” as an “opt in” communication method to help you stay informed about important messages and deadlines related to certification. We hope this opportunity will help reduce the burden of sifting through hundreds of emails.

To increase awareness and further educate the public about the value of board certification, you will see an updated ABFM public website (before the log in) in the spring.  Enhancements include a focus on communicating the value of board certification and why it is important to choose an ABFM-board certified physician for their own care and for their families. Improved navigation, resources such as best practices and tips for completing certification activities will also be available. Finally, to demonstrate ABFM Diplomates’ pride and commitment to lifelong learning, we will feature real family physicians like you on the home page of the website as part of as part of our “Board Certified. Trusted Care.” initiative.

Please be on the lookout for more communications regarding these enhancements as they are launched in early 2024. We hope these improvements will positively impact your board certification experience. We are committed to ensuring that the credential you earn is a meaningful and an accurate measure of your professionalism, knowledge, and commitment to continuous improvement.

Thank you for all that you do.