Clincian Group
  CAHPS

Since January 2005, the ABIM Foundation has spearheaded efforts to develop a set of practice assessment modules that would work for all American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) member boards. A steering committee of ABMS member boards worked with a federally supported national consortium which includes the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to determine if the Clinician Group CAHPS survey could be adapted to meet the needs of ABMS member boards. Adaptation and adoption of a standard survey (with modifications for specialty variation) would avoid redundancy in data collection and allow for national benchmarking.

Recently, the CAHPS consortium has been developing surveys designed to measure patient experience of care at the physician level. ABIM and the ABIM Foundation worked with the CAHPS consortium to develop these surveys and have successfully integrated them into the ABIM Maintenance of Certification program as practice performance assessment tools. ABIM offers these three CAHPS modules as Communications Practice Improvement Modules (PIMs), specific to primary care, subspecialist care and communication with referring physicians. For more information, please visit the Self-Evaluation of Practice Performance page on the ABIM website.

For more information about CAHPS, please go to https://www.cahps.ahrq.gov/default.asp.