Recertification for Internists — One “Grandfather's” Experience

Abstract

Practicing internal medicine can be isolating: lacking the clear-cut outcomes of one-time interventions like surgery, internists work from day to day essentially without signposts indicating success or failure. Without performance data, not only do I, as an internist, have little sense of where I stand, but the clinical leader of my practice group knows little about my fund of knowledge. She has some key evidence with regard to the group's younger doctors, for they are being recertified. If they fail their board examination, it probably indicates some deficiency. But most members of our practice, having become certified before 1990, are grandfathered into the old system of lifetime certification. Now, in the face of public demand for greater transparency, many are pushing for greater accountability through universal recertification — a worthy goal, as my recent experience with voluntary recertification convinced me.