Academic Medicine (07/04/2023) Lyness, Jeffrey M.; McMahon, Graham T.

This commentary supports the case for external evaluation of physicians' knowledge and skills via specialty continuing certification amid attempts to devalue or reduce its application. "Certification boards' role is to set specialty-specific standards for competence, assess to those standards and assure the public that certified physicians are adequately maintaining their skills and abilities; doing so credibly necessarily requires, in part, independent assessments of physician competence," write American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology President and CEO Jeffrey M. Lyness, MD, and Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education President and CEO Graham T. McMahon, MD, MMSc. "In these contexts, the specialty boards are taking approaches to identify performance gaps and leverage intrinsic motivation to facilitate physician engagement in targeted learning." The authors maintain that continuing certification through specialty boards complements continuing medical education (CME) while also being a distinct contribution. "Calls to eliminate continuing certification requirements beyond self-directed CME are contradictory to the evidence and fail the profession and the public," they conclude.

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