FSMB, ABMS to share specialty data

The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) aims to expand its central physician data repository to include board certification data starting next year. Earlier this week, the FSMB announced it had modified its agreement with the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) to enable FSMB to share additional details of specialty board certification data with state medical boards and credentialing organizations. The agreement authorizes the federation’s Physician Data Center to serve as an ABMS Display Agent, which means the information available from FSMB will now include physicians’ certifying specialty board, Maintenance of Certification status, and recertification dates.

The ABMS oversees certification of physician specialists in the U.S., assisting 24 medical specialty boards in evaluation and certification of physician specialists. The FSMB Physician Data Center, a central repository of data from every state medical board in the U.S., includes licensure, disciplinary and educational information on nearly 880,000 actively licensed physicians in the United States. The specialty board certification data is anticipated to be available from the FSMB Physician Data Center in January 2015.

Source: FSMB