There are many doctors who are not board-certified, merely board-eligible. It doesn’t necessarily meant that the physician can’t practice medicine, as this this article cites Dr. Robert Rey, aka celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. 90210.
Given the success of his practice, does business savvy and reputation trump board certification? If so, why should doctors bother to get certified?
You do not have to be the best doctor or care provider in order to have a busy practice. It is well known in the medical community that, if you really want to find out whether a doctor or surgeon is good, you need to ask the key personnel who work with many doctors . . .. . . It makes me wonder why we have board certifications, after all, if the general public does not care much about it. Physicians in medicine seem to be chasing their tails getting more and more qualified, but perhaps this is all a futile endeavor.
Board certification is often needed for hospital privileges and to contract with insurance companies.
As more physicians are going to cash-only, office-based practices, is there less incentive than ever to become board certified?
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Board certification is becoming a pre-condition to obtaining hospital privileges, which itself is usually a pre-condition to obtaining privileges at a surgery center. Most insurers require board-certification or at least initial eligibility without delay to qualifying.
It is a very expensive process, that is for sure. Exam fees alone for me were more than $2000 (they are now higher) and I spent much more than that on travel and lodging to the cities where I was required to go to test and on review materials and on a review course. Re-certification was expensive too.
And what do you get? The right to bill discounting private insurance companies? I suppose I could hire a private IM group to cover admissions from a surgery center (kind of a ridiculous requirement from a practical standpoint; if I have to admit someone to hospital from the surgery center, they likely don’t have a problem I would be best trained to treat, as an ophthalmologist. Most admissions would be for anesthesia complications or cardio-pulmonary disease exacerbations, and patients would be best treated by an intensivist hospitalist, not me.) If I hired a group to cover me, I could ditch the hospital affiliation, which would mean no ER coverage. (I don’t do that, but I’m just sayin’.) There really isn’t much upside. Bragging rights? Hardly. In fact, becoming board-certified has locked me into an expensive maintenance of certification process which really doesn’t add any benefit over my present requirement to fulfill my state-mandated continuing medical education credit accumulation, only added expense.
I guess I couldn’t be a fellow in my professional societies. Now that would be a bummer.
I agree with you on the best way to shop for a physician is not credentials. Do you want the best internist? Ask a ICU nurse, Orthopedist- Physical Therapist, OBGyn- Delivery Nurse and so on. It’s anecdotal but during my training some of the best surgeons were lesser know and the worst surgeons I had ever seen in the OR were “Big Names”.
I don’t know that it’s useful to patients, but as an employer, I won’t even consider an applicant unless they are boarded. For me, it’s simple quality control. It shows me that you learned the things in residency that you will need to know as a practicing ER doc.
(New grads aren’t boarded, of course — they have a couple of years to get it done, and the path to partnership in our group does depend on it.)
Board certification (and the alphabet soup that goes along with it), loses all of its meaning and credibility when our own board certification bodies fail to prevent others from peddling fraudulent board “certificates” obtainable by paying a few hundred bucks.
Board certification is a farse. I know too many doctors who are not board certified who have great bedside manner and skills. A matter of fact, there are a number of doctors who are ‘board certified’ in my field that have very poor skills and have left a track record of dissatisified patients and law suits. Board certification means absolutely nothing and most of the general patient population knows nothing about it, its requirements and qualifications. Luckily, in my town, we took board certification out of our hospital bylaws as a requirement to get on staff. In actuality, we had to discipline two of our doctors who were board certified in their field. They eventually lost their privledges to practice in the hospital. To me, board certification is discrimantory to physicians and surgeons by limiting insurance policy and hospital privledges.
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