To weigh in with your opinions on board certification, check out our recent Practice Notes blog entry.
Board certification: it’s expensive and time-consuming. And it’s almost as much a necessity for practicing medicine today as a medical degree. Certification is a prerequisite for privileges at most hospitals and for credentialing by most insurers. Few practices will hire physicians who aren’t board-certified.
But there’s no doubt that the certification process improves the quality of physicians — and, in turn, patient outcomes.
Or is there?
Although a number of studies have demonstrated a correlation between board certification and improved patient outcomes, there’s actually little if anything in the literature that firmly establishes causation, largely because of the difficulty of controlling for factors other than board-certification that might affect patient outcomes. The sheer domination of board-certification in the medical community, meanwhile, has also made it hard to find cases involving noncertified docs to compare against.
Still, board certification is taken for granted in American healthcare today, less than a century since it took root in the physician establishment. And given that 91 percent of the public considers board certification “important” or “very important” in choosing a doctor; that the Joint Commission lists board certification as a reasonable way for hospitals to meet its requirement to vet doctors; and that some 85 percent of doctors are board certified in at least one specialty, one would think that the medical literature would be heavy with studies quantifying certification’s value to patients.
But it’s not.
So it’s time to ask: Is board certification overrated?
The origins of certification
Board certification has its origins in the beginning of the 20th century, when nearly half of all physicians in the country were general practitioners. Most patients who visited a doctor never saw a specialist, and many GPs were accustomed to providing all manner of care to their patients, regardless of specialized need.
That situation irked specialists like Derrick T. Vail.
In 1908, Vail, president of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, proposed a board that would license ophthalmologists. He hoped it would protect patients against what he called the “six-week specialist,” those physicians with little training in the specialty — and, no doubt, he was also hoping to protect genuine specialists’ turf against overstepping generalists. As Alvin A. Hubbell, chair of the AMA’s ophthalmology section at the time, noted, the idea would protect the interests of the ophthalmologist “who has qualified at much sacrifice of time, energy, and money.”
In 1917, the American Board of Ophthalmic Examinations, now the American Board of Ophthalmology, was formed. Other specialties soon followed the board-certification model, and in 1933 the Advisory Board of Medical Specialties, later renamed the American Board of Medical Specialties, was formed. Currently, the ABMS comprises 24 certifying medical boards.
Over time, the concept of board certification has been transformed. Conceived as a one-time certification granted for life, periodic recertification has lately become standard. Certification now represents more of a barometer of the physician’s ongoing knowledge than just a demonstration of academic study.
The process continues to evolve today. While a knowledge exam is still a core feature, many boards now incorporate peer review, practice performance indicators, and even patient assessments as required components of certification. The idea of comparing physician performance to evidence-based best practices and national quality benchmarks is already a key feature of certification for the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Pediatrics, and it’s a concept that is spreading rapidly to other ABMS member boards.
“Board certification has served as the gold standard for close to 75 years now in assuring the public that those that bear the imprimatur of each of the 24 boards that comprise the [ABMS] have the necessary training, experience, and knowledge to provide high quality care to their patients,” says James C. Puffer, MD, president and chief executive officer of the American Board of Family Medicine.
Numbers don’t lie . . . do they?
Maybe so, but what does that gold standard mean in the real world? Are board-certified doctors better doctors?
A 2002 review article written by Lisa Sharp and four others that appeared in Academic Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Association of American Medical Colleges, examined relevant studies published between 1966 and 1999 that attempted to correlate board certification to better outcomes. Sharp and her colleagues identified 13 studies (of some 200 that they looked at) that positively correlate certification and clinical outcomes. But they also noted gaping limitations on the quality of available research. Only 5 percent of the papers they looked at used appropriate research methods, they said. And while they cite various studies that associate certification with “increased medical knowledge, superior training, and certain aspects of patient care,” they note that none of these studies were direct measures of clinical care.
Of the studies Sharp and her researchers examined, no two measure the same variable of outcome within the same specialty. And none of the studies measured physicians’ time since board certification — an important factor, since some physicians practicing today were certified for life before boards began requiring periodic recertification. “Many factors unrelated to the physician affect clinical outcomes, such as the type of clinical setting, size of support staff, and systems of clinical care, to name a few,” they write.
Still, Sharp and her colleagues supported the continued use of certification as a means of evaluating doctors: “Despite the lack of unequivocal evidence documenting the value of board certification, we do not advocate removing it as a measure of expertise. Intuition, expert opinion, surrogate markers, and the findings reported here support the ABMS position that board certification is but one of several important considerations in evaluating a physician’s knowledge, skill, and ability to provide good clinical care.”
Eric N. Grosch, a physician who formerly practiced internal medicine and is now attending law school, read the Sharp review at the time, and found her team’s position uninspiring. He wrote his own review article in response, publishing “Does Specialty Board Certification Influence Clinical Outcomes?” in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice in 2004.
“They came to the conclusion that there was no good evidence, no strong evidence, no conclusive evidence that showed board certification was any advantage,” Grosch says in an interview. “But they said they still recommend it as an index of expertise. That’s known as ignoring the evidence.” Grosch noted that two members of Sharp’s team were ABMS executives at the time of their article’s publication.
