Maintenance of ABCO Certification

What is Maintenance of ABCO Certification?

The guiding principle of the Maintenance of ABCO Certification (ABCO-MOC) process is to foster continuing excellence in optometric patient care. It is intended to encourage, stimulate, and support life-long education in the practice of optometry, with a focus on ensuring that ABCO Fellows are staying current with advances in relevant health care. The program provides an avenue for compliance with future third party payors since these are expected to require either participation in a maintenance of certification process or comparable means of demonstrating continued competency. Once certified by the ABCO, all ABCO Fellows are required to participate in maintenance of the ABCO Certification in order to remain an ABCO Fellow.

The ABCO, in consultation with the American Regulatory Boards of Optometry (ARBO), has established the following maintenance of certification program.

Description of the Maintenance of ABCO Certification Process^*

The ABCO does not believe periodic re-certification alone is the most effective means of enabling certified optometrists to demonstrate that they are keeping abreast of changes in the profession. Accordingly, following the recommendations for medicine made by the American Board of Medical Specialties^*** (ABMS), instead of a periodic re-certification examination as the sole means of demonstrating continuing competence, to maintain ABCO Certification and Fellowship in the ABCO and to demonstrate that the ABCO Fellow is committed to a rigorous program of life-long learning, ABCO Fellows must participate in the Maintenance of ABCO Certification (ABCO-MOC) program from the time they become ABCO certified. The ABCO-MOC process, described in detail below, occurs in five-year cycles which begin on January 1 of the year following the year in which the applicant first became ABCO certified.

In order to extend the validity of an ABCO Certificate for subsequent 5 year cycles an ABCO Fellow is required to satisfactorily participate in and complete the ABCO-MOC program, which is an on-going self-improvement model incorporating elements designed to encourage and facilitate acquisition and retention of key optometric knowledge. ABCO Fellows are automatically enrolled in the ABCO-MOC process upon obtaining their initial ABCO Certification. Based closely on the recommendations made by the ABMS for maintaining certification in medicine, depending on your cycle, the ABCO-MOC Process is a three or four-step process combining continuing optometric education, self-assessment learning and evaluation, and ongoing maintenance of high moral character. Additionally, once every other ABCO-MOC cycle, each ABCO Fellow must satisfy a cognitive expertise examination requirement.

Step 1: Continuing Education

The cornerstone of life-long learning is ongoing continued education (CE). Therefore, within each five-year ABCO-MOC Cycle the ABCO Fellow must complete a total of 125 hours of ABCO approved continuing education. The ABCO is not, however, a continuing education provider. Accordingly, the following continuing education courses are "ABCO approved" for purposes of meeting the ABCO MOC continuing education requirements:

Any COPE approved CE course;
Any CE course approved for Category 1 American Medical Association CME credits;
Any CE course approved for Category 1-A American Osteopathic Association CME credits;
Any CE approved by your state's optometry board as counting toward meeting CE requirements for license renewal.

Applicants are expected, but are not required, to evenly distribute the hours over each ABCO-MOC cycle. The following rules and conditions apply to the ABCO-MOC continuing education requirements:

At least 75 of the 125 hours of continuing education must be COPE approved coursework.^**
At least 25 of the 125 hours must include courses with post-course self assessment or multiple-choice examination.
- ABCO Fellows will receive 2 hours of credit toward the 25 required hours of continuing education credit for each one hour of COPE CEE (formerly TQ) courses in which the Fellow takes and passes the post-course examination.
ABCO Fellows will receive one hour of credit toward their 125 hours required continuing education hours for each one hour of
- (a) basic life support or CPR training taken during the ABCO-MOC cycle.
- (b) Providing a COPE approved lecture for a continuing education course during the ABCO-MOC cycle.
- (c) courses (including Grand Rounds) for which CME (continuing medical education) credit is granted.
Subject to the limitations above, all ABCO-MOC continuing education may be "distance learning" (e.g. via web courses or other non-live education such as journal articles) so long as they are COPE approved Distance Learning/Multimedia courses.

As part of the ABCO Re-credentialing application (see below) ABCO Fellows will be required to submit, with their ABCO-MOC re-credentialing application, evidence of all course work demonstrating that they have satisfied the continuing education requirements.

Step 2: Self-Assessment Modules (SAM)

During the final two years of each ABCO-MOC five-year cycle the ABCO Fellow must take and complete a self-assessment examination module (SAM). The SAM, which will be offered through an on-line process taken via the Internet, will include self-assessment of current optometric knowledge, optometric procedural skills including the use of and the interpretation of results from current diagnostic equipment, communication skills, ethics, utilization of evidence based/best practices decision making, peer comparison, and patient records and record-keeping. ABCO-MOC requires that the applicant obtain a passing score on the SAM, and the SAM itself will be designed to assist the Fellow in obtaining the information and knowledge necessary to correctly complete or answer each question. SAM examinations need not be completed in one sitting. Each SAM will be made up of approximately one hundred multiple choice questions divided into two fifty-question tests.

Step 3: Practice Performance Assessment (PPM)

In order to satisfy the ABMS' Part IV, Practice Assessment and Quality Improvement, requirement, during the final two years of each ABCO-MOC five year cycle the ABCO Fellow must complete one practice performance assessment module. The practice performance assessment entails an evaluation of approximately fifteen patient records and your patient management practices reflected in them as compared with the then current evidence-based practices and standards of care, to help identify weaknesses and develop action plans for improving patient care in your practice. It is anticipated that the PPMs will be undertaken in conjunction with the SAM tests, but practitioners will typically take several months to complete the patient/chart review PPM process.

Step 4: Moral Character Recredentialing Application

During the fifth and final year of each ABCO-MOC cycle the ABCO Fellow must submit an updated ABCO Re-credentialing Application together with the ABCO-MOC Credentialing Application fee.

Step 5: Cognitive Expertise

During every second ABCO-MOC cycle (once every 10 years) each ABCO Fellow will be required to demonstrate cognitive expertise in optometry by passing a validated and independently administered criterion referenced closed-book examination. ABCO will be developing the details of the cognitive expertise examination requirement in accord with then current ABMS recommendations and standards, and anticipates providing ABCO Fellows with several options for satisfying this requirement for completion of the ABCO-MOC cycle. The goal of the cognitive expertise examination requirement is not to re-examine the understanding of basic principles that have already been examined, but to ensure that doctors are maintaining expertise by staying abreast with new understandings in basic and clinical science and are competent in the utilization of new diagnostic and treatment modalities relevant to the practice of optometry.

Program Completion

The Maintenance of ABCO Certification program is designed to ensure that all ABCO Fellows are maintaining doctorate level knowledge and skills in the current standards of optometric practice and are capable of providing quality up-to-date patient care. Fellows who do not successfully and in a timely fashion (e.g. within their cycle) complete all elements of the ABCO-MOC program will have their Certificate and Fellowship suspended until they satisfy the ABCO-MOC requirements. A certificate suspended due to failure to satisfy ABCO-MOC will expire in one year after the suspension begins. Once expired, the only mechanism to obtain a new Certificate and be reinstated to Fellow status is to complete the requirements for initial certification again.

Upon satisfactory completion of all required steps of the ABCO-MOC process the ABCO Fellow will be granted a new five-year ABCO Certification, will be entitled to continue to hold the designation of Fellow in the American Board of Clinical Optometry (FABCO), and will automatically begin a new five-year ABCO-MOC cycle.

* The ABCO reserves the right to modify the ABCO-MOC process at the discretion of the ABCO Board of Directors in order to stay current with the recommendations of ABMS and third party payers.

** Upon request, for applicants practicing in states which do not offer or give credit for COPE approved continuing education, ABCO may grant credit toward meeting ABCO MOC requirements to non-COPE approved courses that have been approved by the applicant's state licensing board.

^*** ABMS MOC and criteria are the property of and copyrighted by the ABMS. "ABMS MOC" is a trademark of the ABMS. Please see http://www.abms.org for full information. ABMS has not endorsed and is not affiliated with ABCO.