• An organization of the 24 approved medical specialty boards in the United States that coordinates the activities of its Member Boards. A directory of all 24 Member Boards can be found in the Resources section of this website.
• Provides information to the public, the government, medical professionals, and its members concerning issues involving specialization and certification in medicine.
  

• Individual Member Boards evaluate physician candidates who seek certification and recertification.
• Member Boards:
  • Determine whether candidates have received appropriate preparation in approved resident training programs, in accordance with established educational standards.
  • Evaluate candidates with comprehensive examinations.
  • Certify those candidates who have satisfied the Board's requirements.

• No, ABMSdirectory.com is a valuable reference and research tool. If you require primary source verification for credentialing, please see details at www.boardcertifieddocs.com. It is designated by the ABMS as an Official Display Agent and does provide primary source data on behalf of the ABMS. For additional details about that service, please contact:
  Licensing
  Phone: (800) 523-1649, ext 3276
  E-mail: b.mee@elsevier.com

• Once a physician has successfully completed all requirements for board certification, the Member Board must forward the name of the new diplomate to ABMS in order for the physician to be included in our publications. The time involved for transferring the new diplomate's information varies by board.
• ABMSdirectory.com is updated quarterly. If a change to an existing record or a new record is received after an update, that information will be displayed in the next quarterly update. Each profile displays the Data as of date in the top right corner for your reference.
• DOs (osteopaths) are initially certified by an Osteopathic board. Many choose to maintain their board certifications and sub-certifications exclusively with those boards. Those DOs will not appear on ABMSdirectory.com. If a DO chooses to become certified by an ABMS Member Board, their ABMS certifications will be displayed on this site. Their osteopathic certifications will not be displayed.

• Yes, a physician may be certified by multiple boards.

• You can enter the city and state in the search form. In order to narrow the list you can select the Specialty or Sub-specialty (certification or sub-certification) field to find a list of physicians in your area. You can also search within X miles of a zip code.
• NOTE that physicians who have identified their location as "Clayton" will not be found under "Saint Louis" or vise versa. Be sure to check under various cities that may be applicable.

• MOC is lifelong training for physicians that was established by each of the 24 Member Boards in 2000. The guidelines for measuring MOC participation vary by board. When applicable the profiles of each physician will include the MOC participation status listed under the certification data section. A link is displayed on each profile (to the right of the MOC data) that provides access to each Member Board's website to review their specific MOC information. The MOC status is provided as additional information when reviewing the professional profile of various physicians. However, an indicator of "no" in the MOC section does not affect the physician's board certification status, unless there is also a label in the certification section that indicates "Not Currently Certified".

• Profiles that display "unknown city" and then the state abbreviation are records in our database where the physician requested that information to be suppressed (private) and we can only provide the state information.

A few of the 24 ABMS Member Boards allow physicians to retain their certification in a sub-specialty with an expired general certification. For example, a physician's profile can list the Internal Medicine general certification as NOT CURRENTLY CERTIFIED but also display one or more sub-specialties without that message, indicating it is current. In this example the physician is still board certified.
AMERICAN BOARD OF INTERNAL MEDICINE originally certified 1994
CERTIFICATION(S):
Internal Medicine NOT CURRENTLY CERTIFIED
SUBCERTIFICATION(S):
Critical Care Medicine

The following boards do not require physicians to maintain a general certificate in order to maintain subcertifications.

• Anesthesiology
• Emergency Medicine
• Internal Medicine
• Pathology
• Pediatrics
• Surgery
• Urology

As you may have discovered the Sub Certification drop down menu on the Advanced Search screen now includes Critical Care Medicine and Internal Medicine-Critical Care Medicine. The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) partnered with The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) to provide their diplomates with the option to participate in Critical Care Medicine fellowships and then take the Internal Medicine-Critical Care Medicine exam administered by ABIM. The certificate title for this subspecialty indicates the administering board. Other boards offer certification in Critical Care Medicine and they administer their own exams.
To search for these subspecialties by a specific board, select one of the boards from the drop down menu on the Advanced Search screen. For a list of the boards that offer the Critical Care Medicine subspecialty, please refer to the Resources page and click on the Certificates Offered by Multiple Boards link. Details are in the paragraph at the top of the PDF. To receive search results that include both subspecialty titles, select Critical Care Medicine from the Sub Certification drop down menu and then click the plus/minus symbol. Select OR from that drop down menu. Next, select Internal Medicine-Critical Care Medicine and then add search criteria to at least one other field before clicking Submit to run the search. There are over 10,000 records in our database with the Critical Care Medicine subspecialty. In order to receive accurate and a smaller quantity of results you will need to include other search fields from the Advanced Search page.