Learners claiming variable credit receive a really great visual warning when they try to claim MOC Self Evaluation Points, letting them know in red font that their profile is missing one of four key points of Board Certification information: Diplomate ID, First and Last Name, and DOB. This is important for us, since our AMS integration populates their profile on first login to Ethos, and most learners don’t touch their profile until they receive this error.
We use variable credit for live meetings and it’s pretty effective, provided learners realize they need to click to claim AMA PRA Cat 1 and MOC. For a while, most of our learners found our enduring elearning after completing their first live meeting evaluation in Ethos, so their profile was set up for MOC.
However, an increasing number of our learners are finding our elearning first (which is exciting!). We set enduring content to automatic credit, because our enduring content has fixed credit amounts and we think variable credit would credit extra clicks and confusion. It also saves us customer service calls from folks who intended to claim MOC but missed or didn’t understand the need to click a second credit claim required by variable setup. The trade-off is that new users who have never set up the Board Certification section of their profile whose first feedback is a “reported credit failure” email when their MOC is rejected. Auto-MOC credit also creates confusion for NP/PA learners who don’t participate in MOC, but still receive credit failure. This is a minority of our learners, so we have put the burden of poor user experience on them rather than variable credit on a majority of physicians, but we would love a system that considered both. For now, we can only resolve these issues through proactive or reactive customer service.
I’d like to see a pop-up warning for learners in this automatic/fixed MOC credit situation. This might occur when a learner without a complete Board Certification profile signs up for a course with MOC, or immediately on completion of the Credit course object of such a course.
For learners who don’t participate in MOC, perhaps there could also be an option under Board Certification for learners to attest “I do not currently participate in MOC and suppress those credits from auto-sending.”