On Saturday, 1 December 2018, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) suffered a meltdown of its highly touted “Knowledge Check-in” (“KCI”) alternative to its mandated Maintenance of Certification® (MOC) program.
At 09:45 AM, Saturday, December 1, 2018, during the ABIM Internal Medicine Knowledge Check-In (KCI) administration, Pearson VUE – ABIM’s exam delivery provider – experienced network instability issues that affected hundreds of physicians scheduled to take the Internal Medicine KCI exam.
As a result of these issues, over a period of approximately two hours, physicians were unable to start the KCI, and those who were in the process of testing were unable to proceed.
“KCI,” a program that requires continuous payments to ABIM of $155 per year per US physician, was heavily promoted by ABIM as a “kinder, gentler MOC” that physicians could perform in the comfort of their own home, provided of course, that the physician’s computer met ABIM’s exacting standards. If not, the physician was required to pay an additional $130 to take their MOC examination at a PearsonVue testing center. Sadly on Saturday, hundreds, if not thousands, of US physicians (we really don’t know) – all of whom had already funded millions upon millions of dollars for expensive executive salaries, benefits, and contractor expenses to the ABIM for years – lost another of their few precious free weekends staring at computer screens like guinea pigs for academic medicine’s biggest income redistribution Ponzi scheme, MOC®.
Not surprisingly, after a lackluster apology, the ABIM tried to deflect blame to someone else: Pearson VUE.
“We at Pearson VUE take full responsibility for Saturday’s disruptive outage of service for ABIM’s Internal Medicine Knowledge Check-In. ABIM did everything they could to help us – and support you – during this time. It was our system that had these issues. As we have promised them, we promise you that we are taking additional steps in order to prevent this from happening again. We are extremely sorry for this unfortunate and rare occurrence and also apologize to the ABIM organization for the disruption and surrounding issues this may have caused. We are committed to continue working in partnership with ABIM in the care and handling of this incident.”
Calls made to ABIM assured physicians that only Pearson VUE was involved in the online proctoring. But there is an important disconnect in the announcement made by ABIM about this incident. Note that the press release issued to the public mentions that physicians at home AND at Pearson VUE testing centers were affected:
At approximately 9:45 AM (EST), on December 1, 2018, ABIM began receiving reports from Pearson VUE and individual test takers that they were unable to begin the exam or were unable to continue it if they had already started.
Their explanation is incomplete.
Might the problem have gone beyond Pearson VUE since individuals at home were similarly affected?
Recall that security of ABIM’s examination is of utmost importance to them. They’ve even had a “Director of Test Security” and even sent their own director of test content to spy on physicians attending a board review course without their knowledge and later sanctioned or suspended over 130 physicians’ board certification certificates accusing them of “cheating” in 2009. At that time, the same Director of Test Security for ABIM also worked for a litle known test security firm, Caveon Test Security. It was David Foster, PhD, CEO and President of Caveon Test Security, who was also a Chief Scientist at Kryterian Global Testing Services that touted the security and reliability of their patented keyboard and eyeball monitoring services to the American Board of Pediatrics Foundation on 15 May 2015. It was Kyterion’s home testing platform that the ABIM’s entire KCI initiative was based.
ABIM diplomates like myself want to know what role the link to Kryterian Global Testing Services had in the events of December 1, 2018 KCI meltdown. ABIM is obligated to come clean on this issue, since it appears more than just testing was occuring that Saturday in December. If the link to Kryterion’s keyboard and eyeball tracking technology were involved, physicians’ privacy rights may have been violated as well in the name of test security during this latest MOC® debacle.
-Wes
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