Invitation
The fifth Physician Accountability for Physician Competence summit is scheduled to take place on December 6-7, 2007 at the Dallas Marriott Solana hotel, approximately nine miles northwest of the Dallas Forth Worth International Airport.
The meeting will begin with a pre-event reception and dinner on Wednesday evening, December 5, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. Please make every attempt to attend the dinner and participate in the group activities that are planned. Thursday and Friday, December 6 and 7, will be full days, with Friday’s session ending at 3:00 p.m. Further details are provided on the attached acceptance form. Logistical information about the meeting and pre-event materials will be available at: www.innovationlabs.com/summit.
Based on overwhelming feedback from participants at the January summit in St. Petersburg about needing to expedite progress on several fronts, the December meeting is being designed as three “mini” summits that will take place simultaneously. Each mini-summit will focus on a specific “track” of work emerging from previous meetings. The three tracks of work slated for the program are:
Track 1: Sustaining the Effort
This session will build on work that took place at the January summit in St. Petersburg, with a particular emphasis on reaching consensus about the feasibility of forming a national alliance for physician competence. Activities will be structured around issues such as:
- Feedback from last month’s Discovery Session on Complex Adaptive Structures, where a subset of PAPC participants learned about theories of complex adaptive structures and then used that learning to consider models for an alliance;
- Recommendations for alliance structure, including oversight, staffing, funding and short- and long-term strategies for sustaining the PAPC initiative;
- Improving the interface between stakeholders along various points of the medical education, training, licensure and certification continuum; and
- Strategies for expanding our community of interest.
Track 2: Measuring Competenciess
Again, building on work that has been done at previous meetings, this session will focus on developing and reviewing standards, terminology, metrics and tools for measuring competencies essential to good medical practice. Topical areas for discussion may include:
- Next steps with the Good Medical Practice-USA document, to include development of a process for incorporating feedback about the document;
- Exploring tools and methods that could be used to measure competencies described in the document;
- FSMB’s draft report on maintenance of licensure;
- The relationships among “competence assessment” efforts, such as pay for performance, maintenance of licensure and maintenance of certification;
- Dealing with incompetent physicians, including their remediation;
- Transparency and its importance to the process of evaluating and ensuring physicians’ continued competence; and
- Design of potential pilot projects
Track 3: Infrastructure for Information Exchange
This session will focus on developing an infrastructure for exchanging data from multiple sources, with a specific focus on models, technologies and implications. Topics that may be explored include:
- The Trusted Agent as a mechanism for data exchange, to include development of an action plan for its development which addresses funding, “ownership” and legal issues;
- Lifelong learning portfolios and their utility to practicing physicians;
- The role of electronic health records and other data aggregation initiatives (e.g., personal health records) in a future system of measuring and determining physician competence;
- Other implications and issues of data exchange, including balancing data confidentiality with transparency to the public; and
- Design of potential seed projects.
Please indicate your first and second choice of tracks on the attached acceptance form. While you will be participating in only one mini-summit track, opportunities will be available throughout the two-day meeting for all participants to learn about work being accomplished within each mini-summit.
Please complete the attached attendance form and return it to Inge Williams via fax at 817-868-4142 or via email at iwilliams@fsmb.org by October 31. If you have any questions about the mini-summits or thoughts about additional content that could be included, please contact Carol Clothier at the Federation of State Medical Boards at (817) 868-4042 or via email at cclothier@fsmb.org.
Thank you for your continued support of and participation in this important work. We look forward to seeing you in December.
Sincerely,
James N. Thompson, MD
President and Chief Executive Officer
Federation of State Medical Boards