PRACTICE MANAGEMENT Help Desk

AAO Offers Help for Recertification

For ophthalmologists concerned about the burden imposed upon them by the new Maintenance of Certification (MOC) process, mandated by the American Board of Ophthalmology, the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) will soon be extending a helping hand. The AAO, in partnership with Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, is creating an online educational resource to help doctors navigate the time-consuming process of recertification. The Ophthalmic News & Education (ONE) Network will serve AAO members as a single-source for obtaining and updating clinical knowledge. ONE’s services will include:

• practice standards
• presentations
• cases
• self-assessment tests with online remediation
• the ability to earn and manage CME
• educational videos of procedures
• tools to maintain certification resources
• focused news and alerts
• journal articles

Academy members who use the ONE Network will get high-quality information, news and educational tools on demand, the AAO promises, to assist them with both the closed-book examination and the online chart review portions of the MOC.

“We cover the cognitive knowledge part of MOC extremely well and hope to do the same for Practice Performance Improvement by the launch of ONE,” says Richard Zorab, AAO vice president of clinical education. The Academy expects to launch ONE in November, to coincide with its annual meeting in New Orleans. It will be available on the AAO’s Web site, www.aao.org. Additionally, the AAO says it is developing a tool to allow MOC candidates to measure performance improvement in their practices.

Beginning in this issue of Ophthalmology Management, ophthalmologist Andrew Rabinowitz, M.D., will recount his experiences with the MOC process, as well as evaluate the resources currently available to facilitate MOC. OM