The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) recently unveiled their new standards for continuing certification, which take effect in January 2024 (https://www.abms.org/board-certification/board-certification-standards/standards-for-continuing-certification/). The standards comprise 4 categories:

• General Standards
• Professional Standing and Conduct
• Lifelong Learning
• Improving Health and Health Care

The standards are meant to guide the design of the continuing certification programs of their member boards, including the American Board of Urology (ABU), adhering to the spirit of the standards in ways that make sense given the specialty.

The ABU and the AUA have a long-standing, productive, and collaborative relationship, given our shared interests in assuring and supporting the highest standards of urology care for patients in the United States. As a few representative examples, the ABU’s existing Practice Assessment Protocols link to AUA Guidelines, and many AUA members are currently recognized for their participation in the AQUA (AUA Quality) Registry as a component of Continuing Certification. Building on this strong foundation, the AUA is pleased to assist in developing requirements and opportunities associated with the 2 new standards (No. 18 and No. 19) under the Improving Health and Health Care category:

• Standard 18. Quality Agenda: In collaboration with stakeholder organizations, Member Boards must facilitate the process for developing an agenda for improving the quality of care in their specialties. One area of emphasis must involve eliminating health care disparities.
  • Identify areas in which patient care can be improved, review the areas, and define strategies to improve care.
• Standard 19. Engagement in Improving Health and Health Care: Member Board continuing certification programs must commit to helping the medical profession improve health and health care by:
  • Setting goals and meeting progressive participation metrics that demonstrate an ever-increasing commitment towards having all diplomates engaged in activities that improve care.
  • Recognizing the quality improvement expertise of partner organizations and seeking collaborative opportunities for diplomate engagement with efforts to improve care through a variety of existing efforts.
  • Working with partner organizations, including medical specialty societies, to create systems (eg, data transfer process) for diplomates engaged in the organizations’ quality improvement activities to seamlessly receive credit from the Member Boards.
  • Modeling continuous quality improvement by evaluating methods and sharing best practices for program implementation and diplomate engagement.

In establishing these new standards, the ABMS recognizes the intrinsic motivation of physicians to provide safe, effective, and efficient care, as well as the professional norms of working to improve skills and work collaboratively with others to improve the systems within which care is delivered. The ABMS also encourages alignment of the new requirements with diplomates’ daily practices and existing activities that may be required by other stakeholders in the health care system so improvement activities may be applied to multiple purposes.

These new standards align well with existing AUA quality improvement and measurement goals and activities. In the coming months, AUA staff and members of the Science and Quality Council and Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Committee will partner with ABU to develop a National Urologic Quality Strategy based on the Institute of Medicine framework for safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-centered care, and incorporate elements of that strategy in ABU requirements for continuing certification.

We are excited for this opportunity and grateful for the collegial engagement with our colleagues at the ABU. I encourage anyone interested in providing input or otherwise participating in these activities to reach out to me personally (mnielsen@med.unc.edu) or to the AUA Quality and Measurement team (quality@auanet.org) for more information.