2023 Customer Awards: Federation of State Medical Boards - Community Uplift Award

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Company: Federation of State Medical Boards

Company background: The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) is a non-profit organization representing state medical and osteopathic boards in the United States, the District of Columbia and its territories as they fulfill their mandate of protecting the public’s health, safety and welfare through licensing, disciplining and regulation of physicians, physician assistants and other health care professionals.

Contact: Xiaomei Pei

Title: Research Project Manager - Research and Data Integration

Country: United States

Award Category: Community Uplift Award

Tell how you've used SAS to have a positive impact on your community?

The Federation of State Medical Board (FSMB) maintains a national repository of licensure, disciplinary, educational and demographic data for all physicians licensed to practice medicine in the United States, the District of Columbia and its territories. The FSMB receives data directly from state medical boards and partner organizations including the National Board of Medical Examiners, The American Board of Medical Specialties, the American Osteopathic Association and the Department of Health and Human Services et al to maintain up-to-date physician information.

Analyzing these data with SAS, we have been able to serve medical regulators and policymakers in three distinct ways:

• Annually update reports on all licensed physicians in the United States, documenting licensure, educational and demographic characteristics of the nation’s licensed physicians, to inform decisions shaping the future of the nation’s physician workforce.  FSMB Physician Licensure in 2022 
• Document disciplinary trends of U.S. physicians who have engaged in incompetent or inappropriate behavior. Tracking physician discipline is key to protecting the public and ensuring the safe practice of medicine. FSMB Physician Discipline in 2022 
• State medical boards and the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact (IMLC) have responded the increased demand for healthcare by making it easier to obtain medical licensure in multiple states during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. FSMB’s advocacy efforts play an important role in helping state legislatures determine if the IMLC is a good fit for their state and data related to the number of physicians eligible to obtain a license through the IMLC is a key component. SAS tools have been instrumental in organizing information about physicians’ educational credentials, licensure examination history and the absence of discipline into a meaningful metric.

What SAS products are you using and how are you using them?

Our research team uses SAS Enterprise 7.1 to import data, to cross-check data sources to ensure quality and perform data queries. SAS is an invaluable resource as most of our data files have more than one million observations and multiple variables, which requires a high level of computing resources.

We have also used many of SAS’s regression analyses to support the physician health care community by studies including how:

• Specialty certification can reduce the risk of physicians receiving disciplinary actions. Association Between Surgery Certification and Disciplinary Actions and Relationship Between Certification and Discipline Against Family Physicians  

• Better performance on licensing exams is associated with a lower likelihood of receiving disciplinary actions by physicians. Relationship between COMLEX-USA and Disciplinary Actions  and USMLE and Risk of Disciplinary Actions 

What was your most surprising discovery about your work?

While physician regulation and practice are very similar throughout the United States, the power to license and discipline physicians is at the state level. The FSMB is fortunate to receive comprehensive data on all licensed physicians in the United States, but it also takes a great amount of time, resources and thought on how to integrate data for more than one million licensed physicians that comes in multiple data formats, sources and files.