What is the American Board of Medical Specialties?
The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) is an organization of 24 approved medical specialty boards. The ABMS serves to coordinate the activities of its Member Boards and to provide information to the public, the government, the profession and its members concerning issues involving specialization and certification of medical specialists.

Is this web site recognized as primary source by JCAHO or NCQA?
Yes. The website and TMP are recognized as an Official ABMS® Display Agent.

Display Agent License from ABMS may be found on the website at: http://www.certifacts.org/jcahoncqa.htm.

How long has CertiFACTS been on-line?
We were the first web site to offer on-line primary source verification of all 24 ABMS Member Boards in one place with effective and expiration dates. We started in October of 1999 and now have several thousand active clients. We have over a 95% renewal rate on the CertiFACTS On-Line subscription service.

How often are you updated? Another vendor is telling us they get daily updates.
We are updated daily by ABMS and ABMS receives updates at different times during the year from the member boards. Each Member Board does not update ABMS daily as the exams are given at various times during the year. Additionally, recertifications come in to the boards throughout the year. If you are told a licensee is updating information daily, they are not referring to the board certification information but rather to address, telephone changes, or changes to certain biographic data other than the ABMS data.

What boards issue time-limited certificates and where do I find information about when time-limited certificates were first issued?
All 24 ABMS Member Boards now issue time limited certificates of varying time lengths depending on the board, although physicians who were certified before the initiation of these time-limited certificates are grandfathered and do not have to recertify. Many physicians choose to recertify even if they have lifetime certification(s). This is why you may see subsequent certifications after an initial lifetime certificate. To find out when each board began time-limited certifications, please see Time Limited Table - General Certificates & Time Limited Table - Subspecialty Certificates* on our Links page. Some boards are also offering more limited recertifications for shorter periods of time to help fulfill physician CME requirements so you may see some overlapping dates.

What are the requirements for board certification?
This answer appears below as the last answer on this list. Also see Requirements for General Certification on the Links page.

What are the requirements for recertification?
See Requirements for Time-Limited Recertification* on the Links page.

Why does your database not show the biographical information contained in the ABMS Official Directory of Board Certified Specialists (also known as the Compendium)?
This information is self-reported by the physician and is unverified information that is not a part of the ABMS Database. The ABMS and another licensee co-publish the books and have a joint copyright on this self-reported biographical data. Because it is unverified, this information does not constitute primary source data to satisfy JCAHO or NCQA for verification of education purposes.

How do I contact a particular Member Board?
See the button for Member Boards on this page or go to this page located on our web site http://www.abms.org/member.asp.

How do I find out if a particular certificate is issued by an ABMS Member Board?
Please refer to the file located at the Certificates button on the side of most of the pages on the site and use your find key to search or print the file.

Do some boards require written and oral exams?
Some boards only require a written exam and some require a written and an oral exam. We will not have the information until the physician has completed and passed both portions of the exam and received either a certificate or a congratulatory letter. A list of these are shown in the Requirements for General Certification & Requirements for Time-Limited Certification mentioned above accessed on the links page. Written exams are generally given in the fall or winter and orals in the spring or summer.

How do I find out if a physician is board eligible or board qualified?
Until the physician is certified, only the individual Member Board can provide information as to whether the physician is in the boarding process. Most of the boards no longer recognize the term “board eligible” and can only tell you if the physician is “board qualified” which means they have applied to take and been accepted to take the exam. See Policy Statement on "Board Eligible" on the links page.

Why is a particular physician not board certified?
Board certification is a voluntary process and over 80% of the physicians in the U.S. are board certified; however, a physician is licensed by the state to “practice medicine and surgery” and board certification is not a requirement for licensure. A licensed physician may practice in whatever area of medical interest they have and can legally hold themselves out to be practicing in that field of interest without necessarily having obtained a residency or fellowship providing advanced training in that area. Board certification, however, means that the physician’s skill and knowledge in the specialty/subspecialty has been examined and tested and meets standardized requirements. Additionally some of the surgical specialties require one or more of years of experience in doing a variety of cases before a physician can take their certifying exams (the number of years can vary according to the board). The physician in question may fit that category and be working toward obtaining the requirements for certification. Most International Medical Graduates need to complete some required training in this country before they are able to take a particular board’s exam if all the postgraduate training was completed in another country. Exceptions are made and vary with each board. (Some boards may accept Canadian and/or United Kingdom residencies. Call the Member Board for further information on this.)

How do I find information on a board that is not recognized by ABMS?
There are hundreds of self-designated boards across the country that are called the American Board of . . . however, unless the board is recognized by ABMS, we do not have information about that board or its particular requirements for certification. A few have applied for ABMS membership and have not met the criteria; many others have never applied for approval.

Why are you showing a certificate with an expired date?
If the date is within the past year, it is possible that the physician has recertified but for whatever reason, this information has not yet been forwarded to ABMS by the board. You will need to contact the board directly to find out about that particular physician. We have chosen to keep diplomates in the database with expired certificates so that you can determine the status and decide if you wish to investigate further. Certificates that we know are expired will show up in red print on the results screen. If we have no ending date on a time limited certificate, it will not show up in red, but please refer to the time limited table for further information or contact the Member Board directly.

Why is the address you are showing out of date?
If the physician has not notified his or her Member Board of their address change, we will only have the last known address. The ABMS has chosen not to display home addresses where an address is known to be a home address. Please access the change of address form which should be completed by the physician and mailed or faxed back to us and we will forward this on to ABMS. There may be some delay before the changed information appears. In some cases, the physician may have notified the Member Board of a change of address but they may have not yet updated ABMS with the new information.

We have discovered a discrepancy in your information and ours – what do we do?
Please contact us so that we may obtain the necessary documentation to correct any errors if there are any. In a database of almost 600,000 names, there are going to be some occasions of data entry errors or misspellings. Although it is minimal, with your assistance, we can correct any discrepancies.

Am I prohibited from sharing the printed board certification information with others?
Please refer to your signed legal agreement for clarification on this issue or contact us by phone at (800) 733-2267 to explain any issues you may be unsure of.

Can we place the board certification information on our own web site?
Again, please refer to the paragraph above. You can make reference to a physician’s board certification status but may not show the dates of certification on a web site unless you have a legal agreement to do so directly with ABMS.

Can we input the board certification information into our credentialing software program?
Yes, as long as you abide by the confidentiality terms of the legal agreement that governs your use of the data. See previous paragraph next above. Dates may be entered into your credentialing program for internal use as long as the information will not be accessible to anyone not covered under the agreement.

Does your database contain board certification information on D.O.s?
Only if the physician has completed an ACGME approved residency program can a D.O. sit for the ABMS board exams. If the physician's postgraduate training is all osteopathic, they are only eligible to take the exams given by the American Osteopathic Association and the ABMS database does not contain AOA data.

If a doctor is "licensed to practice medicine" does that mean he/she is certified?
No. Obtaining a medical license and being certified as a medical specialist by an ABMS Member Board are two different and separate processes. A license, legally required in order to treat patients, is issued and required by the state or territory in which a doctor practices medicine. A specialty certificate is issued by a medical specialty certifying board, which is valid nationwide. Although certification is not required for an individual physician to practice medicine, most hospitals and managed care organizations require that at least a certain percentage of their staff be, " board certified." Today, approximately 89% of licensed physicians are certified by one or more ABMS Member Boards.

How do I find out if a physician has had malpractice suits or complaints?
To find out if a physician has any malpractice suits or complaints on file, contact the applicable state medical board for more information or the National Physician Databank. For a complete listing of state licensing boards, visit the Federation of State Medical Boards' main web site at http://www.fsmb.org and select the "State Medical Board Info" link.

How do I find out if my physician has been disciplined by a state medical board?
For more information on a physician's disciplinary history, please visit the Federation of State Medical Boards' new web site, http://www.docinfo.org which offers instant access to a nationally consolidated database of state disciplinary data.

Why is the data on the physician I am looking for not appearing on this web site?
Make certain that you are using the physician’s correct legal name and especially the name that was used on the certificate to ensure a correct match. For married female physicians, try to check under the maiden name if you cannot find it under the current name. Sometimes physicians change their name legally and the board will change it in their database upon the physician’s request and with proof of the legal name change although they may or may not issue a new certificate.

Can you define what it means for a physician to be board certified by an ABMS Member Board?
Specialty boards certify physicians as having met certain published standards. A board certified physician has completed an approved educational training program and an evaluation process including an examination designed to assess the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to provide quality patient care in that specialty. There are 24 specialty boards that are recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). All of the specialties and subspecialties recognized by the ABMS may be found by pressing the certificates button on this web site. A subspecialist first must be trained and certified as a specialist in order to be certified as a subspecialist by one of these recognized boards, and the physician must complete certain requirements. Generally, these include:

• Completion of a course of study leading to the M.D. or D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathy) degree from a recognized school of medicine.
• Completion of three to seven years of full-time training in an accredited residency program designed to train specialists in the field.
• Many specialty boards require assessments and documentation of individual performance from the residency training director, or from the chief of service in the hospital where the specialist has practiced.
• All of the ABMS Member Boards require that a person seeking certification have an unrestricted license to practice medicine in order to take the certification examination
• Finally, each candidate for certification must pass a written examination given by the specialty board. Fifteen of the 24 specialty boards also require an oral examination conducted by senior specialists in that field. Candidates who have passed the exams and other requirements are then given the status of "Diplomate" and are certified as specialists. A similar process is followed for specialists who want to become subspecialists.