New Ambulatory Care Subject Examination Is Available

A new subject examination for Ambulatory Care began administration on August 1 and is now available for medical school faculty. The Ambulatory Care subject examination replaces the former Adult Ambulatory Medicine subject examination.

Staff from NBME collaborated with members of the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) Task Force to create the new Ambulatory Care examination. The CDIM Task Force selected all of the test items to ensure the content was relevant and guided by the ambulatory portion of the CDIM curriculum.

“The Ambulatory Care subject examination was refreshed with extensive input from the CDIM members with the goal to create something relevant to clerkship students on ambulatory rotations,” said Michael Elnicki, MD, Director of International Medical Education Programs and Combined Ambulatory Medicine Clerkship. “We use the exam at the University of Pittsburgh for our ambulatory clerkship and are pleased with it.”

“NBME has been collaborating with external stakeholders more than it ever has in the past,” said Marie Maranki, Product Manager for NBME’s subject examinations. “We’re listening to feedback and making efforts to improve our products to better meet their needs.”

Some key features of the new Ambulatory Care examination include:

• New score categories are reported from the refreshed content.
• Equated percent scores are reported to align with score reporting for the other clinical science subject examinations.
• A score equivalency table has been provided on the NBME Services Portal (NSP) to help medical school faculty translate scaled scores from the former Adult Ambulatory Medicine examination to equated percent correct scores on the new Ambulatory Care examination.

NBME staff are conducting informational webinars for medical school faculty to learn more and ask questions about the new Ambulatory Care examination on September 18 (register here)  and October 2 (register here).  

In addition to the webinars, for more information regarding the Ambulatory Care subject examination, please contact the NBME subject examination team at subjectexams@nbme.org.