Maintenance of Licensure threatening in Washington State-it must be fought NOW!

 The FSMB is a corporation with monetary interests in passing this legislation to initiate regulatory capture of physicians and physicians ONLY:

"William Gotthold, MD

Congressional District 8

In 2010, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) adopted a framework for Maintenance of Licensure (MOL) that called for license renewal to be contingent on evidence of participation in a program of life-long learning and continuous professional development.

This was to be more focused than the current requirements in most states for some hours of CME. In the past two years an FSMB task force, including many different stakeholders, has developed a set of recommendations that states can consider when they create their MOL requirements.

There are two parts to the model. One is to stay up to date in your area of practice, which is CME in its various forms.The other is to measure your performance in your actual practice to look for possible areas of improvement, obtain education or guidance on how to improve, apply that knowledge, and then measure again to verify improvement. Staying up to date with CME is not a new idea. The new concept is to measure actual practice performance, focus the CME where needed, apply this new knowledge to the practice, and then re-measure.

For many practitioners the measurement component is already part of various mandated reporting on quality parameters. Physician groups, hospitals, insurers and Medicare all do some form of quality measurement.

Most of these are aimed at process (did you measure the A1c), but more recently some are attempting to measure actual outcomes (what percent of your patients have an A1c at an acceptable level). Active participation in these types of programs should satisfy the measurement requirement. For other practitioners not involved in these formal programs, there are many CME programs that that have initial measurement and subsequent re-measurement as part of the CME process. More of these will surely be developed as more states move to the MOL model for license renewal.

For physicians certified by a member board of the American Board of Medical Specialties, active participation in the Maintenance of Certification program of their board will suffice for the requirements of MOL.

More information about the history of the MOL concept, and resources for CME programs, can be found on the FSMB website at www.fsmb.org/mol.html"

This constitutes legislated medical care by a non-profit Corporation eager to sell you testing and products, just like the ABMS except this is mandated for you to re-license! The boards are "voluntary" at this point but the FSMB is out to make you dance! Information on how to fight this is available at:

Kempen PM: Successful Opposition to Maintenance of Licensure: The Ohio Experience as an Educational Template.  Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 2012 17:103-6 http://www.jpands.org/vol17no4/kempen.pdf and 

Kempen PM. Maintenance of certification and licensure: regulatory capture of medicine.  Anesth Analg. 2014 Jun;118(6):1378-86.