Do State Continuing Medical Education Requirements for Physicians Improve Clinical Knowledge?

ABSTRACT:

Objective

To evaluate the effect of state continuing medical education (CME) requirements on physician clinical knowledge.

Data sources

Secondary data for 19,563 general internists who took the Internal Medicine Maintenance of Certification (MOC) examination between 2006 and 2013.

Study design

We took advantage of a natural experiment resulting from variations in CME requirements across states over time and applied a difference-in-differences methodology to measure associations between changes in CME requirements and physician clinical knowledge. We measured changes in clinical knowledge by comparing initial and MOC examination performance 10 years apart. We constructed difference-in-differences estimates by regressing examination performance changes against physician

SUBMITTER: Vandergrift JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5980292 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature