Research Projects

ABMS Research and Education Foundation

The American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) Research and Education Foundation (REF) grant program supports innovative research that explores the impact of board certification and aims to enhance healthcare quality and professional standards.

2024–2026 Grant-Cycle Winners

In 2023, the ABMS REF invited grant proposals under two themes: General Certification (funded by the ABMS REF) and Diagnostic Excellence Through Certification (primarily funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation).

General Certification

The General Certification theme supported investigator-driven proposals that spanned the full range of the ABMS mission and were not limited to any one area or topic. Meet the ABMS REF grant winners in the General Certification theme and learn about their research.

Arch Mainous III, PhD

Professor
University of Florida

  • Project: The Impact of Continuing Certification on Quality of Patient Care
  • Summary: Does participation in continuing certification activities lead to improved quality of care by participating family physicians?

Brigitte Smith, MD, MHPE

Associate Professor
University of Wisconsin

  • Project: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of the Relative Merits of Different Oral Certifying Examination Formats
  • Summary: This will be a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study using semi-structured interviews to investigate the perceptions of recent diplomates, and ABPS, ABOS, and VSB directors and psychometricians, regarding the relative merits of different Oral Certifying Examination formats, paying particular attention to the impact of the certification format on early-career clinical behaviors.

Daniel West, MD

Senior Director of Medical Education and Professor
Penn School of Medicine
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

  • Project: A Multi-Site Implementation and Effectiveness Study of a Protocol to Support Equitable Competency-Based Advancement Decisions and Resident-Driven Learning
  • Summary: A consortium of five pediatric residency programs will conduct a staggered, two-wave implementation of an EPA-based assessment program across their sites, using implementation science methods to test whether an implementation bundle will improve implementation fidelity as well as resident-driven self-assessment and learning activities.

Fasika Woreta, MD, MPH

Associate Professor of Ophthalmology
Wilmer Eye Institute
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

  • Project: Gender, Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Oral Board Examiners of Surgical Specialties
  • Summary: This research project aims to evaluate the diversity of examiners and examinees in surgical specialties, analyzing trends over a decade and assessing the impact of examiner-examinee gender concordance on pass rates.

Diagnostic Excellence Through Certification

Offered during the 2024–2026 grant cycle, the Diagnostic Excellence Through Certification theme was principally funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Grant applications aligned with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Diagnostic Excellence Initiative, which sought to strengthen accountability for diagnostic excellence, support growth and capacity of the field, and assess the potential for new technologies to improve diagnostic performance. Meet the ABMS REF grant winners in the Diagnostic Excellence Through Certification theme and learn about their research.

Laura Burke, MD

Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Harvard Medical School

  • Project: Association Between Emergency Medicine Board Certification and Diagnostic Error in Emergency Care: A National Analysis
  • Summary: The investigators will use the Medicare Claims data to examine the association between certification by the American Board of Emergency Medicine and the risk of diagnostic error for beneficiaries visiting the Emergency Department.

Kiran Malhotra, MD

Clinical Informatics Fellow
New York University Langone Health

  • Project: Automated Mapping of Visit Diagnoses to Specialty Board Clinical Domains for Enhanced Assessment, Certification, and Precision Education
  • Summary: The investigators will develop an automated precision medical education tool using electronic health record (EHR) data to describe an individual resident’s diagnostic exposures and evaluate their impact on key patient outcomes.

Ting Wang, PhD

Senior Psychometrician
American Board of Family Medicine

  • Project: Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy and Calibration via Automated Clone Item Generation and Personalized Feedback in Longitudinal Assessment
  • Summary: This study aims to harness artificial intelligence to support “learning through testing” in medical certification processes by evaluating AI-generated cloned test questions and assessing the impact of tailored feedback from large language models on improvements in accuracy and confidence of learner diagnosis.

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