Dr. Johnson: We do have over 700 volunteers. It would be almost impossible to, if we were paying those physicians to do the work that they do provide for us as volunteers. One of the great honors in being even certified is serving as a volunteer. I started my career as a volunteer doing the oral board exam probably over 30 years ago. And it’s been a tremendous experience just getting together socially with what used to be twice a year in Chicago to have camaraderie with my fellow emergency physicians. And I found that during that time it was amazing the things that you could exchange with your colleagues that ultimately would even make you a better physician.

It is the case that having paid individuals is expensive. We do try and compensate our volunteers by providing airfare, hotel room, and a meal stipend. We do what we can to offset some of that expense, but to pay someone full time I think would be probably an impossibility. Recently, we spent about $10 million putting in a new IT system and technology and this will be something that will provide a greater experience for all of our diplomates. And we continue to invest in various ways to improve providing the services that we provide to all of our diplomates.

Dr. Dark: How are the test takers, the candidates, doing in terms of either their initial certification or their recertifications on things like the ConCert exam that was transitioned to the MyEMCert exam? What topics are of concern to ABEM as it pertains to what we as emergency physicians are not doing well on?

Dr. Johnson: That’s a great question. I would probably have to do some research to see if there are any particular subject areas that are problematic. One of the things that we have tried to do with the continuing certification exam or MyEMCert is to really look at ways that we can expedite knowledge translation into reality. And I think we’ve been extremely happy with the fact that we’ve really tremendously reduced how long it takes for us to take knowledge that’s in the literature and bring it to our practices. In addition to the standard MyEMCert content are key advance questions. The key advances which are really cutting edge things that are happening in the field of emergency medicine, which we can bring immediately to the attention of our diplomates.