Well, good morning. My name is Jeffrey LaBeouf, and I serve as the Executive Director of the American Osteopathic College of Occupational and Preventive Medicine. Welcome to our basic course. As you know, the basic course is divided into three parts, and it's offered both in live conferences and through our AOA partnership on their on-demand portal. So we'll talk a little bit more about that, but regardless of whether you're joining us live or virtually, I'd like to welcome you to the basic course. So our college is a group of medical specialists in occupational preventive medicine. Preventive medicine, the review committee of the ACGME, the American Council on Graduate Medical Education, has several review committees, one for each specialty, and the review committee in preventive medicine adjudicates training programs and accredits them in the disciplines of aerospace medicine, occupational medicine, and general preventive medicine slash public health. There's also a few fellowship programs that they adjudicate. Medical toxicology comes to mind, undersea hyperbaric medicine, and they do have some partnerships with some other review committees for some of their fellowship programs. Interestingly enough, the ACGME just claimed jurisdiction over correctional medicine, so they'll begin to accredit correctional medicine. They call it Carcile Medicine Fellowships, and for a while, that's being managed by the what they call the Institutional Review Committee, which is the review committee that accredits the sponsoring institutions of residency and fellowship programs, but I anticipate that that'll be moved over to the Preventive Medicine Committee at some point. So our college represents all of those disciplines and sub-disciplines. So we obviously help the medical professionals that are members of our college stay and get connected. You have to come to one of our live courses if you haven't yet. They're phenomenal. They're small. You really get to know some of your colleagues and peers. I can remember back in the Byzantine era when I was doing graduate school, a commencement speaker said one of the most important tools you'll have in your career is your Rolodex. Well, that has become the contacts portion of our cell phone, but our live meetings are a great way for you to expand your contacts and your collegial network of peers so that you can exchange best practices. So we do offer this three-part course in Occupational Environmental Medicine. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the other courses that we offer as we matriculate through this brief introduction. For those of you that maintain a primary board certification by the American Osteopathic Association in any discipline, this basic course in Occupational Medicine is part of the qualifications to gain the eligibility to sit in the exam and earn your certificate of added qualification in Occupational Medicine. There is an alternate pathway. You can amass 100 hours of Category 1A CME in Occupational Medicine. You also have some other requirements. It has your training, i.e. the CME course has to be spread out over at least a one-year period. In other words, you can't just go to a four-day weekend and get the basic course or get 100 hours of CME in OCMED. They want you to spread that out because it's supposed to approximate a fellowship and do independent study and dedicate a minimum percentage of your practice to the practice of Occupational Medicine. So I'll cover that in a little more detail, and then Dr. Dan Barry from our Board of Preventive Medicine will also make some remarks during this introduction. We have, several years ago, developed a sister organization called Occupational Preventive and Aerospace Medicine. The idea of creating a second 501c3 educational organization was just to expand our membership base beyond just osteopathic physicians. So we want to make sure that people that don't really have a CME home, i.e. nurse practitioners, PAs, MDs, that may practice in one of these disciplines or sub-disciplines such as correctional medicine, or they might be a corporate medical director, that they always have a home. And I think by eliminating the word osteopathic, it has been a little easier to market our OPAM courses, Occupational Preventive and Aerospace Medicine. So currently, we brand our special workshops OPAM, including this basic course. We also do a medical officer review course in partnership with the MRO Certification Council. We are the teaching arm, and they're the certifying arm. We also do the Department of Transportation, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners course. So if you use the acronyms, that's the DOT, FMCSA, and RCME course. And that's so that you can, several years ago in 2014, the Department of Transportation mandated that anybody doing commercial driver's license physicals for interstate truck drivers needs to attend a course and pass a certifying exam because they wanted there to be more reliability and validity of the exam process of the commercial truck drivers. Before that, depending on what provider you went to, you might have gotten a more or less onerous exam. There was a lot of doctor shopping if you had some medical conditions. So we go through the course and go through all the various body and disease systems and kind of instruct you on the best practice guidelines of how to do these exams. And then we talk about the regulatory and compliance piece of being a registered DOT medical examiner. Again, we're the teaching entity, the testing entity in this case is the FMCSA themselves. And they've contracted with places like Prometric and Comera. So you basically go to a local testing center in your hometown or near your hometown. You don't have to go across the country to sit these exams. So welcome to our basic course, regardless of which part you're taking or whether you're doing it live or through our on-demand portal, we welcome you. And our faculty, if you're joining us remotely, our faculty stands ready to reply to any questions you have via email. So feel free to route those either directly to the faculty member, if you have their email address or to Rhonda, and we'll have her email at the end of the presentation. So we are, this activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education or ACCME through the joint providership of the AOA, the American Osteopathic Association and our college. The AOA is accredited by ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. We also provide category 1A AOA credits as an accredited AOA provider. So our course has been designated for eight hours. You know, over the years, as we update courses, they may fluctuate between, you know, seven and nine hours. And that kind of depends upon the timing. We ask our speakers to shoot for 50-minute models, but sometimes they'll go 30 minutes. And it also depends on questions and answers from the audience. If we have a really good question from a live audience member, and we could hear the question and hear the answer, and that has meaningful educational content, we'll ensure that that is edited and captured in the recording as well. That may increase our time a little bit. So part one of the basic course is being offered live in Conroe, Texas on March 20th. And our current on-demand courses are parts two and three. Currently, we have two parts at any given time. And every six months, a part rotates off of the platform and another one rotates on. And by us having this stagger, it kind of forces the one-year time horizon. I am trying to work with the American Osteopathic Association to develop a policy or a process that would prohibit a participant from taking all the three courses at the same time or in close proximity to one another and to cheat the one-year rule. I would love to have all three parts available online at all times. That way, if you're only needing part three, you don't have to wait for it to come back online, for example, if it happens to be in its one-year period where it's offline. So that's kind of what we're working towards. But right now, there's always two of the three parts online. If we could ever get to where all three parts are online, we would also issue the requirement that you have to attend at least one of our live conferences. And that could either be at our mid-year meeting, which is our standalone conference. In this case, it's March 20th through the 24th in Conroe, Texas. The basic course is a pre-conference workshop offered the day before. And attending that conference, if you do the basic course, you'll get eight hours for that. And then attending the full program live, you should get about 25 hours. Alternatively, you could go to the AOA's OMED conference. And that is a conference that a lot of different specialty colleges provide the content for. And we're one of the breakout sessions. There's some plenary sessions where the entire profession comes together. And some of those have a preventive medicine focus as well. So you tend to pick up a lot of hours by going to OMED. And we normally do not teach. We used to, but we've gotten away from doing a basic course at OMED. But you can pick up a lot of the 1A credits in occupational medicine and our other disciplines as well, aerospace and public health general preventive medicine. And it's a great way for you to meet colleagues. So that's something that we're looking to add to the requirements. Used to, you had to attend these virtually, so it wasn't a big deal. But we would love for everybody not to miss out on the important learning that takes place at our live conferences through informal networking and in meeting and introducing yourself to your colleagues. So the information in this course is provided for general medical education purposes only. It is not meant to substitute for your independent medical judgment relative to diagnostic and treatment options of a specific patient's medical conditions. The viewpoint expressed in this CME activity are those of the authors and of our teaching faculty. They do not represent an endorsement by the AOA. In no event will the AOA or our college be liable for any decision made or action taken in reliance upon the information provided through this CME course. So a lot of this legalese is required of our accrediting bodies. So we don't have any commercial support. If you are in a position where you're working for a company that would like to provide commercial support, we would graciously apply for a grant and accept that commercial support. I would love to be able to change this slide, but right now we are solely dependent upon your registration fees and the operating reserves of our specialty college to put on these courses. So please let me know. Jeffrey LaBoeuf, or one of our officers or staff, a lot of our speakers are also AOC OPM officers. Let someone know if you have any problems with the facilities, handouts, program content, online portal, and delivery system, or any other issues with our course or our conference. Concerns about the CME program's compliance with AOA's uniform guidelines may be expressed to us. And we do have our 800 number published here. And we can provide you copies of these guidelines. There are available online. You could look them up as well. And unresolved issues obviously can be brought to the AOA's Department of CME. And we have that phone number as well. So the Certificate of Added Qualification in Occupational and Environmental Medicine represents a credentialing in the field of medicine. The CAQ is approved by the AOA through established criteria and a written exam administered by our certifying board. In this case, the American Osteopathic Board of Preventive Medicine. As I mentioned earlier, you have to have completed your AOA training and have a primary board certification from the AOA and hold an unrestricted medical license. And you either have to complete 100 hours of CME within the last five years, 50 of which have to be category one, or complete our three-part basic course in occupational and environmental medicine. You must spread your coursework over at least a one-year period. So there's more information that's from our certifying board for the CAQ. If your residency training complete in aerospace, preventive medicine, public health, or occupational medicine, I've also got you a link of how to achieve AOA board certification. If you have ABMS certification and you're a recent graduate of a training program, please contact our college regarding the possibility of applying for a scholarship. We'd love to pay your initial certifying exam fee in order for you to get duly certified. If you graduated several years ago, I don't recall the exact cutoff date, and have been ABMS certified for a period of time, we do have a reciprocity process where you could apply to become duly certified. And it's at no cost to you, and you don't even have to take the initial exam. You just have to agree to participate in our newly revised maintenance certification program, which is basically kind of baked into our courses where our post-conference post-test serves as the ongoing continuous learning as required by the certifying board. Here's the contact information for the certifying board, and they have an email address, aobpm.osteopathic.org. So there's a firewall, and that's what the little bricks here are representing, between the college and the certifying board. So our college is separately incorporated. We're a Georgia corporation. We're a 501c3 educational organization. We are a professional membership organization with a voluntary board of trustees that serves as our governing body. We provide the CME, and we're the teaching entity. The Board of Preventive Medicine is a part of the American Osteopathic Association. They have a division of board services called Certified Board Services, and our board administers primary board exams in our three disciplines that I've repeated ad nauseum to you this morning. We also administer sub-specialty exams. When I say we, I should say they. The Board of Preventive Medicine administers sub-specialty exams in Correctional Medicine, Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine, and the Occupational Medicine CAQ. Now these two, Correctional Medicine and Undersea Hyperbaric Medicine, both require a fellowship. The OCMED has a grandfathered commission where we still have the CME pathway that I've described. Some of these exams are through what we call conjoint committees, and there's other certifying boards. For example, Family Medicine participates in the Correctional Medicine and Hyperbaric Medicine. Exam and board as well, but these exams are administered by our board. Okay, and this is how you join the college, and questions regarding course content can be filtered through Rhonda. Questions about AOCOPM can also be directed to Rhonda. She serves as our office manager and is wonderful at getting back to you in a timely fashion. So our needs assessment, I'm gonna kinda show you, but this is a vital study aid for you. It is part of your handout pack that will either provide you links if you're at a live conference or it's in the handout section of the on-demand portal if you're taking this through that methodology. But it's a great study aid. It has a nice bibliography of additional learning resources. It has all of our learning objectives. You know, the bibliography's really impactful and powerful. It has some key links to other organizations that might help. So I'm gonna briefly show you what that looks like. This hot link, I'll be happy to send you our actual slides of this presentation upon request, and you can actually have the hot link. But anyway, this handout is available through those sources I told you. And this kinda tells you kinda what the exam might look like from our board. And every 10 years, the board does a job task analysis, which is a fancy word for a survey of current practicing occupational medicine physicians so that they could readjust this domain distribution and add information that might be new since the last exam was created, item bank. So we have overall learning objectives. It touches on all of the core competencies. And then these are the learning objectives for each part. Now, don't get wrapped into this order. A lot of times for each of the parts, we'll teach them in a different sequence depending on the needs and convenience of our faculty. But this is what you'll get in each of the parts. And these are the learning objectives. And then, as I mentioned, there's a really good bibliography and supplemental resources and a link to our website. And then here's some other websites and phone numbers that will be of use to you. So anyway, this is for you to study, and hopefully that works well for you. Okay, so let's see if I could get back to my other screen so I could go on to the next slide here. So another boilerplate that I have to read to you, the American Osteopathic Association has implemented a policy to comply with the current ACCME standards for integrity and independence in accredited continuing education, requiring resolution of all conflicts of interest faculty declaring a relevant commercial interest must be identified in the activity syllabus and our program. In accordance with the disclosure policies of the AOA and ACCME, every effort has been made to ensure all CME activities are balanced, independent, objective, and scientifically rigorous. These policies include complying with the ACCME standards for integrity and independence in accredited continuing education, resolving all possible conflicts of interest and control of content, all relevant financial relationships have been mitigated. So the following faculty presenters and planning committee members have indicated they have no relationship, they could be perceived as a potential conflict of interest, nor will any off-label drug usage be discussed. And you could add me because I'm technically presenting at least this intro to you. I don't have any commercial interests or grants or whatnot that I would love to have some. So if you have any and would like to retain me, let's talk. But currently, unfortunately, I have nothing to disclose. So there's photos of your handsome faculty. And what we'll do is defer introductions to the beginning of each lecture. And of course, faculty may change from part to part. So you may not see all of these people at every part. And some of the parts may have other speakers. But anyway, if you're here in Conroe, these are your faculty. So at this point, I'm gonna segue and we will start the video presentation from the chairman of the American Osteopathic Board of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Daniel Barry. Board certification is a thing that we offer. And it really helps to have a certification because with a certification, it means that you can now get jobs in places that require occupational medicine certification. It means you can also get better reimbursement, increase pay and other things like that. So it's good to be certified. And so several years ago, we saw that there was a need. The AOA actually came to our board and said that there is a need out there. Would our board be willing to put something together so that we could offer some certification? So it didn't mean that you had to go through a full residency program to become completely board certified in occupational medicine. Meant that if you were board certified by any board and you wish to add a qualification to your current certification, that you would be able to get that with occupational medicine. Our board complied and provided the CAQ. The CAQ is the Certificate of Added Qualification. It's a credential offered by the board for those who have completed the training that you are now taking. The training is actually a year long program. If you take all three basic courses, you can take one at the beginning of the year, one in the middle of the year, and one at the end of the year. So in a 12 month period of time, you can finish this program and be eligible to sit for the CAQ in occupational medicine. Now with that year long training, you have the in-person training, which you have here at this course, but you're also seeing patients occupational medicine as a part of your practice. In fact, one of the things with the CAQ when you apply for the CAQ, is you get a letter from either your boss or a colleague or somebody that can attest to the fact that you are seeing occupational medicine patients, some of them in your practice, not full-time or anything like that. But anyway, with the practice that you do between the times you take the exams, the self-study that you do and everything, it's a year long program, which leads to the Certificate of Added Qualification in occupational medicine. And I'm just gonna tilt this back so they wanna see your forehead for some reason. Yeah. Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate that. For everybody that's out there watching this, I wanna let you know, we've got nine people here in the room and we've got several of you looking in virtually on that. So some of you may have heard, is the CAQ in trouble? What's happening with that? Because we were quite concerned about what was happening. And let me kind of explain. Whenever there's a credentialing type of organization that takes a look at what you're doing and decides whether to credential it or not, you can either get credentialed or you can lose those credentials. And so we wanted to make sure that we were not in trouble. Every once in a while, the BOS, that's the Bureau of Osteopathic Specialists, reviews things and it came time for them to review us. Now, what had happened was, they had a lot of CAQs within the AOA in the past, but the MDs called it sub-specialty rather than Certificate of Added Qualification. And so the AOA decided, well, they were going to look at calling things sub-specialty and it matched up quite well for most of the CAQs, but not so much for our CAQ. Let me give you an example. If you did a three-year residency in internal medicine and then you went out and did a fellowship in cardiology, then you could take a CAQ to get an added qualification in cardiology, which was based on the fact that you had your primary certification in internal medicine. Well, the MDs call that sub-specialty. So in other words, if you did it in the MD world, you'd have your initial certification in internal medicine and you'd get sub-specialty in cardiology. So when the AOA decided to do that, they renamed their CAQs into sub-specialties and they rewrote their handbook for the BOS. And it said, okay, to get a sub-specialty, it needs to be in your primary specialty, not in a different specialty. And you need to complete a one or more year fellowship in order to be able to qualify for that sub-specialty. Well, when we looked at this, we said, well, that doesn't make sense for us with occupational medicine. You don't do occupational medicine residency and then get a sub-specialty with this course and with the one-year training that we have. So, you know, we were concerned and we talked to the college about it and we let the college know that there was concerns about this. And we didn't know if we were gonna be able to continue on with this and continuing offering the CAQ in occupational medicine. Well, we met with the Bureau of Osteopathic Specialists and we explained, we said, look, you came to us several years ago and asked us to put this together to meet a need in the osteopathic specialty for our physicians. And so we did exactly what you asked us to do. And we said, there's a difference between a sub-specialty and a CAQ. A sub-specialty has to be within your own primary specialty whereas a CAQ is added. You have one specialty, you now add this to your specialty. And we said, furthermore, we don't have an accredited one-year fellowship where they are in person with training. But I said, our program is one year long. Our program starts out with a basic course in occupational medicine. People practice, they come for another basic course, they go back and practice, they get another course. And so at the end of the year, they actually have a full year of occupational medicine intensity in the training, which leads to this CAQ. We didn't know what the BOS was gonna say. Were they gonna reject it and say, no, our handbook, our policies, procedures don't allow this, that we've rewritten them and you just don't meet it. That was what we were afraid of. Good news is they came back and they rewrote their handbook, the BOS handbook for a CAQ, which perfectly meets what we've been doing for our CAQ. And they do this review maybe once every 10 or 20 years or whatever. And so we're set. I mean, everything looks really good for continuing on with the CAQ into the future. And regardless of what the status of our board is, and that's a different topic, which I'll be addressing later but the CAQ is assured and we'll continue to go on. So you're gonna be able to get a good certification out of this if you take the CAQ exam after completing the three courses and that certification will be valid and will last and there shouldn't be any problems with it. I've used up my time, but I did save a few minutes to be able to answer questions. If anybody here in the live audience or anybody out there in the virtual audience has a question, please go ahead and let me know now. When is the exam given usually? The exam is usually given once a year. It has been typically in the spring. However, we may be giving it in the fall. We're looking right now at when is the best time to give the exam when it'd be most convenient for most people. Fall. The fall would be most convenient. Hey, I appreciate the feedback. The spring, I mean, kids are graduating. Yeah. Fall, they're just starting back to school, so there's no time to give the exam. For anybody that's listening out there in the virtual world, one of our people here had said that the fall is the best time for it. And I like that feedback. Our board is really there to serve all of you to meet your needs. We wanna make sure you get your certification and everything else. And so any feedback that we get really makes it better for us being able to serve you in the best way possible. Are there any other questions or comments? Anybody out there in virtually and wanna ask anything? Can you explain the format of your testing of the certification briefly? Yeah, the certification is only a multiple choice exam. We do not have orals or essays with the CAQ, which makes it a lot nicer. You don't have to be nervous about standing up in front of other people or anything else like that. So that's the format for that. It's different than board- What did you say? Oh, where would you take it? Oh, where would you take it? We are moving away from giving it a pencil and paper test to a test, which is online. And you can take it at testing centers all over the country. It's just, you register for it through the AOA, through our board's website. And once you get approved to be able to take it, then you would be able to take it at a location convenient to you. Thank you, that was a good question. Can you elaborate on number of test questions and what is the timing of the test as far as is it one hour test, five hour test? That's a good question. I believe it's a hundred questions. And I believe that there's plenty of time to take it. I think it's like a couple of hours or something along that line. I don't have that information right in front of me. I can get that for you if you would like, but off the top of my head, the best I remember is I think it was about a hundred questions and at least a couple of hours. Very good. And currently on the AOA website, it's showing that the testing for this year is going to occur in October. In October, yes. Yeah, and I had mentioned that we had been doing it in the spring and that we just recently changed that now over to the fall, but yet we're trying to find out what's most convenient for most people. Good comment. Thank you. Any other comments or questions? Thank you very much.

occupational medicine

Certificate of Added Qualification

American Osteopathic College

live conferences

Department of Transportation exams

ACCME guidelines

professional networks