PATIENT SAFETY CME COURSES
Medical societies and other healthcare organizations offering quality educational courses to enable physicians to fulfill the requirements of the ABA Maintenance of Certification in Anesthesiology (MOCA®) program may submit a proposal for their educational courses to be considered for approval.
ABOUT MOCA
MOCA is designed to enable physicians to demonstrate their commitment to quality clinical outcomes and patient safety. MOCA offers ABA board-certified anesthesiologists (i.e., diplomates) the opportunity to participate in a four-part process for continual learning, while advancing the standard of specialty medical care. The four-part program includes:
- Medical licensure
- CME activities
- MOCA Minute
- Quality Improvement
These four components of MOCA are designed to provide assessments of six general competencies: patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, and systems-based practice.
COURSES FOR FULFILLMENT OF MOCA REQUIREMENTS
We may approve patient safety courses that:
- Identify key themes of patient safety that cross disciplines and clinical settings. Key themes shall include, but not be limited to, epidemiology of error, the effect of the system on patient safety, human factors, safety enhancing technology, communication, culture of safety, and methods and tools for evaluating safety events.
- Present a curriculum that addresses key themes and contains learning objectives for each key theme.
The fact that an educational sponsor’s course meets all the above stated requirements is not a guarantee that a course will be accepted, rather the decision to accept the course is subject to the sole discretion of the ABA. All course applications that are not selected will be returned in its entirety to the educational sponsor and no parts of the course application will be used without the educational sponsor’s written permission. Notwithstanding, it is possible that course applicants may present similar proposals and while one course application may not be accepted, another course application with similar features may be used. Thus, all educational sponsors must agree that they may not claim any proprietary rights or interests by virtue of similar submissions being made and the ABA selecting one such course applicant over another. We reserve the right to charge a fee for review of courses.
PROCESS FOR COURSE SUBMISSION
To submit your organization’s course for approval:
- Review the course requirements.
- Complete and submit the MOCA patient safety course application.
DECISION PROCESS AND TIMELINE
We review applications on a first-come, first-served basis. The review and approval process may take up to 10 weeks. During this time, we may request additional information. Once a final decision is reached, the sponsor will be notified. If an activity application is approved, the sponsor will be required to sign a written agreement that specifies the terms of the arrangement with the ABA. The sponsor is responsible for the development and administration costs of the activity and must submit a final report of diplomates’ activity completion. This includes collecting ABA identification numbers from course participants and sending them to the ABA with the completion information.