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An Overview for Preparing Your Case list

The first thing you must remember is the case list is a first impression of you,

You only get one chance for a first impression!!! That’s why it’s imperative that you take the time to have a thoughtful well constructed case list.

Think back to when you apply to medical school. The most important piece of information was your personal statement. You took great efforts to make sure it was perfect it because you knew that this was a first impression. The case list a similar– the examiner sees the case list before they meet you in person and they make that inital impression of how you practice. You do not want to give the examiner an impression that you’re careless. Your case list needs to show them you practice according to the standard of care.

So what do you do first?

First, read the instructions carefully on the ABOG website. This can be accessed by logging into www.abog.org going to publications and selecting basic oral OB/GYN Bulletin.

It’s important to read these instructions carefully because failure to properly format your case list and you MUST have the correct number of categories and patients in each list, failure to do this could have your case list rejected thus being disqualified from taking the exam.

Second, once you’ve read all the instructions the next thing to do is to gather your cases. This can be accomplished by going to medical records and asking for all the patients you admitted and operated on, next going to labor and delivery and reviewing the delivery logbook obtaining records of all the patients you delivered.

So now you have your cases how do you enter them and what’s the best possible way to do this?

There’s two entities that sell case list software:

ABOG website and this can be found at www.abog.org click publications then case list software
Exampro can be found at Exampro click oral boards then case list software

Alternatively you can make your own spreadsheet in a word or excel document this takes time creating templates and tables and is more cumbersome because you have to manually calculate all the required fields that ABOG requires you to have in the OB, GYN, and OFFICE sections

So we’ve discussed on how to obtain your patients for OB and GYN but what about office?

The office case list is unique you must choose 40 compliant patients and show you have discussed and appropriately treated in each, For office there are 36 categories in which exactly 40 patients must be represented each category can not have more than TWO patients. Whats the best way to find these? Going through your EHR and searching categories that apply.

In conclusion, the case list takes time and perfection. It’s important to have several eyes on your case list and preferably someone to review each list who is familiar with the process. WHY? The reason –the case list represents one half of your exam the other half of your exam is the case of the day format which we will discuss in another posting.