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MOC Can Help You Boost CME Participation. Here’s How.

If your learners have been asking about Maintenance of Certification (MOC), you’re not alone. According to Graham McMahon, ACCME President and CEO, many CME providers have started offering MOC-eligible activities for one simple reason: clinicians are demanding them.

The problem, at least until recently, is that MOC is notoriously cumbersome for learners to obtain. And, since most learning software doesn’t support MOC, many CME providers have a hard time offering it. That’s changing, though. Last year, a number of medical boards reformed certain MOC modules and implemented changes to expand the types of CME that was MOC-eligible.

For clinicians, these are welcome developments. But they’re also good news for CME providers looking to extend the value of their activities.

CME+MOC opportunities as standard fare

At the end of 2018, the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) published a draft report providing 15 recommendations for MOC programs. All of the recommendations seek to assuage concerns about the current state of MOC. However, for CME providers, the most important recommendation may be this one:

“ABMS Boards should collaborate with professional CME/CPD organizations to create a continuing certification system that serves the public while supporting diplomates in their commitments to be better physicians.”

In other words, medical boards should work more directly with CME providers.

This recommendation isn’t just a win for clinicians – it’s an opportunity for providers to adapt their offerings to address the demand (and, indeed, the necessity) of MOC. The ACCME knows how compelling CME+MOC learning opportunities are, and its CME Finder tool gives learners a search portal for finding activities that offer both.

The bottom line? A “two birds with one stone” approach to CME is becoming more appealing and more accessible to learners.

There’s a good chance you’ve already interacted with learners asking about MOC. If you haven’t yet, you will soon enough. By combining MOC with existing CME activities or developing new content that simultaneously fulfills MOC requirements, you can provide more value to your learners. They’ll have yet another reason to participate and yet another reason to depend on you for their CME.

The only remaining questions relate to administration. How do you report learners’ MOC participation to the ACCME? And how do you notify the appropriate medical boards?

Automate your MOC reporting and fulfillment.

So, your learners want MOC and you want to adjust your activities to accommodate them. Somehow, you’ve got to track the MOC points, associate them with your learners, add MOC to your PARS report,and send your MOC data to the ACCME. That’s a lot of work, and your existing CME software probably can’t handle it. You’d have to do everything manually.

This could be a hindrance toward offering learners the CME+MOC experience they’re demanding. But it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s the best system we’ve encountered for automating MOC (and yes, we did develop it!):

  1. When creating a new activity in your CME software, you provide the ACCME activity ID and the MOC type and amount.
  2. Learners claim MOC after completing an eligible CME activity directly through the software interface.
  3. MOC points are automatically associated with the learners who claimed them and are added to your PARS report.
  4. At the same time, MOC points are automatically transmitted to the ACCME via a real-time web service. In other words, you don’t have to send them yourself.
  5. The ACCME verifies the data and sends it all to participating medical boards.

Notice how the only thing you have to do was designate a certain activity as MOC eligible when you created it? After that, everything unfolds automatically.

Rievent supports MOC for any of your activities.

Done-for-you MOC reporting and fulfillment has been a standard Rievent feature since 2017. If you already provide MOC, this tool makes it a whole lot easier to manage. And if you’re thinking about offering MOC, you can count “technology” as one fewer hurdle to clear on your way to making it happen.

As demand for CME+MOC options increases, more providers will adapt their activities to maximize participation. With automated MOC tools doing the heavy lifting, you’ll be in the best possible position to accommodate your learners.