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If we survive COVID, political unrest, racial bias and climate change, What will 2030 look like?!
Credentialing Innovations, Level: Intermediate
Primary Presenter: Grady Colson Barnhill, MEd, National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants; Co-Presenter 1: Denise Roosendaal, CAE, Institute for Credentialing Excellence; Co-Presenter 2: Tom Granatir, American Board of Medical Specialties; Co-Presenter 3: Marc Seale, A Prestigious UK University; Co-Presenter 4: Catherine Dower, JD, Catherine Dower Consulting
Going about our daily lives it is easy to focus on tasks at hand and what is required to complete them, but as members of the credentialing landscape, it is important that we sometimes step back to consider and evaluate how our programs intersect with the consumer, the public and society, and to anticipate how we might make improvements. Panelists have extensive experience in certification, licensure and regulation, but also in law, legislation and policy will use a discussion-style format to explore key credentialing, workforce and societal issues:
Re-credentialing Improvements: Through increased education and consumer awareness, the public, employers and other stakeholders may begin to demand more of credentialing processes. A more informed consumer may demand more meaningful recertification/renewal processes to provide practitioners with evidence-based tools to support better patient safety or other outcomes. Increased stakeholder awareness may help strengthen credentialing bodies’ credentialing maintenance processes, but only for activities that are relevant, cost-effective, meaningful and minimally burdensome. Longitudinal Assessment is likely to be a part of this landscape, which will represent a new trend – the marriage of assessment and education to not only document competence but to improve it at the same time.
Regulatory Reform: Increasing consumer awareness and a focus on public safety could fuel more interest in regulatory process, perhaps leading to improvements such as more public members on licensing or credentialing boards. Evaluation of risk could lead to improved regulatory structures with varying rigor reflective of public risk involved (e.g., more relaxed requirements for cosmetologists relative to nurses). Increased rigor could also be applied for individual practitioners shown to be at greater risk for harming the public or having poor outcomes, such as practitioners in isolated practice, those re-entering practice or those who have been in practice for a large number of years.
Credentialing Restructure: The drive for meaningful recertification may lead to more individualized processes that document expertise in specialty or areas of practice focus. Microcredentialing, stacked credentials and so on may facilitate increasingly diverse credentialing schemes within professions. As technology, knowledge and skills develop and expand, practitioners, by necessity may know more and more about less and less. Increased access to big data and AI may make it possible to “automatically” observe practitioner behaviors and help document practitioner competence. For example, access to Electronic Health Records could make it possible to verify physician compliance with best practices or positive health outcomes for a number of patients.
Covid Legacies: What will remain of credentialing changes implemented to survive 2020? More online proctoring, almost certainly, but what are the trade-offs in terms of risk to the public? Clinical rotations, internships or on-the-job training are hard to complete during a pandemic and are costly and time-consuming for both students and educators. Will these requirements be increasingly replaced by simulations? Will there be more regulatory flexibility with regard to scope of practice and reciprocity? Will state borders be more “fluid,” particularly during times of acute need? How will certification and licensing bodies improve their flexibility and responsiveness?
Diversity Issues: 2020 was a year of great unrest and increasing focus on racial bias, systemic racism and cultural issues. With the increased awareness one hopes we will have an increasing understanding of how these issues intersect with credentialing and how we can make improvements. In the credentialing testing space we are likely to see an increased focus on sensitivity reviews of test questions, more studies of bias (differential item functioning) and ways to meaningfully address testing bias. In the education space we will address admission strategies, recruitment and incentives to not only improve diversity in the professions but also improve access to care across the country.