Physicians: An educational program to help you learn patient safety essentials.

BCBSIL is pleased to promote the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) Patient Safety Improvement Program, a professional resource for physicians to learn essentials for improving patient safety in any clinical setting. ABMS is the organization that sets standards for board certification of physician specialists.

The content of the ABMS Patient Safety Improvement Program is designed to be relevant to physicians in all specialties. Learning modules focus on specific ways you can improve upon safety in your clinical environment by carefully examining particular aspects of your practice and implementing improvements based on best practices.  Most ABMS Member Boards offer the program as part of ABMS Maintenance of Certification^TM (ABMS MOC) or recognize its completion and award ABMS MOC credit. Depending on the individual Board’s requirements, credit may be granted for MOC Part IV and Part II requirements. Please check with your certifying Board for individual requirements. 

With a robust curriculum and performance improvement activities, this Web-based program provides a self-paced educational experience presented in these broad areas:

• Patient safety scenarios highlight key themes of patient safety that cut across disciplines such as medication errors, hand-offs and teamwork
• Patient safety curriculum comprehensively covers Epidemiology, Systems, Communication and Safety Culture
• Quality improvement fundamentals provide the tools and techniques to make improvements in practice
• Patient safety improvement activities introduce changes in areas including hand hygiene, medication lists, allergy lists, critical test results, correct person/site/procedure, safer prescription writing and discharge communication

BCBSIL is supporting the process of educating physicians about patient safety by including this CME program in the 2009 HMO Quality Improvement (QI) Fund.  HMO IPAs will be eligible for a QI Fund payment, based upon the percentage of credentialed IPA physicians who have completed the program between January 1, 2008 and October 31, 2009.

The ABMS Patient Safety Improvement Program offers 20 hours of CME credit. This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint sponsorship of HealthStream and ABMS.

Physicians may enroll for the program for $55 by using the following link: www.healthstream.com/hlc/bcbs. The link takes you to a login page where you may register for the HealthStream Web site. Once you have logged in, select the "Catalog" tab and search for "safety."  Select "ABMS Patient Safety Improvement Program," which will take you to a page with details about the CME program. Clicking on "Enroll in this Course" allows you enroll in and pay for the program.

BCBSIL will only be able to give HMO credit for the program if the physician provides online authorization allowing HealthStream to report the physician's completion to Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS).

To help answer some of the most common questions about the Program, a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is available. This list may be printed and duplicated to be used as a reference for you and your office staff.

ABMS Patient Safety Improvement Program Frequently Asked Questions 

For more information about the ABMS Patient Safety Improvement Program, contact Nancy Hudecek RN, BSN, MS at HealthStream, Inc. She can be reached by e-mail at nancy.hudecek@healthstream.com or by phone at (931) 484-3370.  For more information about the BCBSIL HMO recognition program, call BCBSIL at (312) 653-3465.