Would the endoscopy industry benefit from a new credentialing system? I’d never pondered this question. Never, that is, until I read a newsrelease recently from the University of Nebraska Medical Center about a family-medicine resident who is helping create a nationaluniversal credentialing system for endoscopists.
The family medicine resident, Rubab Ali, M.D., is working with 11 national medical and surgical societies on this initiative, according to thenews release. Dr. Ali recently presented three years of research on endoscopy guidelines and accreditation, regarding the creation of a universal accreditation protocol.
“Individually, all the different societies have their guidelines,” Dr. Ali said. “You can see the framework that they follow in terms of credentialing, and obviously the goal is to provide
high-quality patient care and safety. But all these societies have individual frameworks of how to credential the endoscopist. Our goal is to come up with universal guidelines for all the societies.”
Ali’s mentor and one of her collaborators is Dale Agner, M.D. The two have been working with the McGoogan Health Sciences Library and many team members. According to the news release, the collaborators have reviewed more than 500 papers each, to explore four key questions:
- Should competency-based training programs; or procedural, volume-based requirements; or a combination of the two be used for training the next generation of gastrointestinal endoscopists?
- Should credentialing in gastrointestinal endoscopy be based on completion of a competency-based training program and success in cognitive and skill-based examination, or in procedural, volume-based requirements,or in a combination of these principles?
- After initial credentialing, should the decision for recredentialing be based on procedural, volume-based requirements, or procedure-related patient outcome data, or clinical performance assessment based on simulated exams?
- For recredentialing in GI endoscopy, should shorter or longer recredentialing cycle intervals be used to optimize endoscopist performance measures and patient outcomes?
“It is a long process,” Ali said. “It’s a difficult task to bring all the societies together and share research with experts from all these societies.”
Ali presented the framework of her project at the ResQ Committee (Patient Safety, Quality Improvement and Disparities Research Collaborative) meeting last spring. The next step is to extract data from the amassed papers, and to venture meta-analysis and systemic reviews.
“We have experts from this field who will be helping,” Ali said. “Then we’ll be discussing our next steps. Where do we go from here?”
