A Committee of Their Own: Early Career Physicians Have a New Voice at ABIM
Photo Caption: The Early Career Committee. (Standing, left to right) Allison Greco, MD, Chair; Jacob Elkon, MD; Vanessa Williams, MD; Sheldon Rao, MD; Krystal Alexander, MBBS. (Seated, left to right) Scharles Konadu, MD, Council Liaison; La’Nyia Odoms, MD, MSPH; Marinos Charalambous, MD. Not pictured: Jason Liebowitz, MD, FACR.
In the first years after taking “the boards,” physicians are launching a career: starting jobs outside of training, sometimes moving to a new location, taking on new clinical, teaching, research or administrative roles, and looking for opportunities to continue to grow professionally. These changes are often happening alongside other standout moments in life: weddings, graduations, starting a family, buying their first home. Many are paying off educational loans and supporting families in the U.S. or overseas.
These experiences are significant at this stage of anyone’s career, raising important questions about work-life balance and competing priorities—and, for physicians, how continuing certification fits into their professional and personal lives.
The nine physicians in the inaugural cohort of ABIM’s Early Career Committee hope to help answer some of those questions. For the first time, a formal committee of peers will have a role and voice at ABIM, bringing their perspectives to decisions about how physicians at this career stage engage with certification.
More importantly, that perspective will evolve as new internists and subspecialists enter the workforce and represent their peers on the committee in years to come.
“The further out you get from certification, the harder it becomes to stay in touch with what new generations need,” says Allison Greco, MD, an intensivist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Dr. Greco has been a member of ABIM’s Critical Care Medicine Board since 2024 and is now chair of the Early Career Committee.
“My generation is familiar with ABIM’s Longitudinal Knowledge Assessment, for example, but what will continuing certification look like for the next generation of physicians?” she continues. “It’s important that we’re setting standards and making decisions while in touch with physicians who have just been in training. Otherwise, you risk becoming disconnected from the very people you’re trying to serve.”
The Early Career Committee is composed exclusively of physicians who earned certification in 2015 or later—a cohort that has stepped into their careers amidst a period of unprecedented progress in medicine and spent key years learning and working amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them, like Dr. Greco, have served on ABIM Governance or Item-Writing Task Forces, while others are joining an ABIM committee for the very first time. All told, they include clinicians, educators and researchers from a variety of practice environments across the U.S. and represent internal medicine and 10 subspecialties.
While the Early Career Committee is new, physicians at this stage of their career have held a formal representative role in ABIM Governance since 2022. At least one seat on every Specialty Board and cosponsored Advisory Committee is reserved for a physician who earned certification within the past 10 years. The committee represents a step forward in expanding early career physicians’ voices in setting standards and evolving certification to meet the needs of new generations of physicians.
“Early career physicians are positioned to influence medicine for decades to come,” said Erica N. Johnson, MD, FACP, FIDSA, Senior Vice President for Academic and Medical Affairs, an Associate Professor of Medicine and former internal medicine program director at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. “The programs and policy decisions ABIM Governance implements now depend on the perspective of early career physicians to ensure sustainability for the future, and we are all excited to see what we can build together.”
What’s Next?
The committee began its work this fall, initiating work on its own vision statement and setting goals for 2027 and beyond. One of the first initiatives is to create a model for ABIM Ambassadors, a concept based on suggestions from convenings of early career physicians in 2025 and slated to pilot in 2027. The vision: ABIM Ambassadors would have a role in educating their peers about ABIM, certification and Maintenance of Certification (MOC) with support, training and resources from ABIM.
For Dr. Greco, the appeal is that help comes from someone a physician already trusts—an idea she heard multiple times in those early convenings last year. “People wanted liaisons and resources from their peers, and it made more of a difference than hearing information from ABIM,” she says. She recently sat down with a colleague to walk her through the requirements for MOC. “We signed in to her Physician Portal app and I showed her everything,” she says. That kind of help, she adds, reaches physicians “where they’re at, as opposed to emails that they might not have read.”
Dr. Greco’s hope for the future is that the Early Career Committee may even be able to include residents preparing for board exams so that their perspectives can help shape the future of certification to better serve how their generation wants to learn and engage.
ABIM Certified physicians can expect to hear more about the work of the Early Career Committee in the coming months as plans for the ABIM Ambassador program and other events and initiatives take shape.
Heads up: Look for ABIM at Academic Internal Medicine Week 2027 in Baltimore.
How it Works and Getting Involved
As part of ABIM’s governance ecosystem, the Early Career Committee will report to the ABIM Council, which is responsible for setting standards and policies for certification and MOC across all disciplines of internal medicine. The committee works with staff, governance and physician volunteers to set the direction and function of ABIM’s early career initiatives.
Committee members will serve time-limited terms and ABIM will issue calls for applicants when new opportunities arise, as it does with all governance bodies and task forces, so physicians can expect to see more information about how to get involved in the future.
If you are interested in learning more about early career initiatives at ABIM, we invite you to contact us at earlycareer@abim.org.
You can also share your voice in other ways, such as joining the Early Career Network, an online community where you can opt to participate in surveys, polls, focus groups and interviews.
