ABO Policy on Personal Information

When applying for board certification, candidates are required to provide personal information such as demographics, license data, education and degrees, NPI number, place of employment, birth date and credit card data. You may wonder why all of this information is necessary and what ABO does with it.

First and foremost, the data is used to verify a candidate’s eligibility to take the board certification exam. ABO completes a primary source verification for education, licensure and status with the National Practitioner Databank (NPD). Once verifications are complete and a provider has been approved for Active Candidacy, personal information may then be used to communicate with the provider, identify the provider with third-party organizations and confirm provider status with requesting parties. Below is a brief overview of how your individual information may be used.

Credit cards – credit card numbers are used to process transactions through our payment merchant. Credit card numbers are never stored in our system and must always be entered for each individual transaction.

NPI number – NPI number is used to identify a provider when sending files to third parties such as Physician Compare or Healthgrades. This number is used to match providers in our database with other provider databases.

Birthdate – birthdate is used to internally identify providers for verifications. Verification requests come from employers, insurers and credentialing organizations.

Demographic information – information such as address, phone and email are used to communicate with the provider. Information such as business address, email and website are also displayed on our doctor locator app on the ABO website.

Miscellaneous use of information – ABO may use data internally to identify certain segments within our Diplomates and Candidates. For example, we may use graduation year to determine which Diplomates have been in practice more than 5 years, or we may use employment state to identify all candidates practicing in Florida.

ABO will never share our Candidate and Diplomate information with any third party that is a not a contracted partner using the information for approved purposes.