Certifying Boards Can Provide Knowledge that Shapes Policy

The 24 Member Boards of the American Board of Medical specialties (ABMS) are uniquely positioned between the interests of the public and the profession, not in the tensions between them, but rather in the shared space of improving care and outcomes. One way that certifying boards can serve both interests is as an honest broker of highly reliable data at a time when the data that policymakers rely upon is crumbling. In the absence of good data, policymakers can make bad decisions that hurt physicians and our patients. The American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) has collected data routinely from board certified family physicians (also known as diplomates) for more than 40 years but in the last dozen years, it has done so with the express purpose of understanding the ecology of Family Medicine—how it is changing, the pressures on the workforce, and how it affects our diplomates. In 2018, ABFM created the Center for Professionalism & Value in Health Care to help change the policies that affect health care professionals and enable them to deliver better care with less burden and less burnout. Good data have been a key lever for this goal.