MISN Certification

Hi, I'm Dave Dickerson, the chair of the American Society of Pain and Neuroscience's Minimally Invasive Spine and Neuromodulation Certification Program. We're excited that you're considering applying to the program, and we look forward to having you as an enrollee.

After you've completed the application process, you'll have noticed that we've asked you to select effectively just one minimally invasive spine and neuromodulation procedure for your procedural certification this year. That said, every participant will be enrolled in the Minimally Invasive Spine and Neuromodulation curriculum, which is a multi-part didactic course that will now be in its second year, after a very successful first year.

That didactic coursework will be completed every couple of weeks, where there will be a live lecture with Q&A with leading experts from around the world discussing minimally invasive spine and neuromodulation procedures, biomechanics, patient selection, complication management, and also integrating these treatments into your practice settings, to really help your communities receive the relief and benefits of these treatments.

The program will have the written test following the didactic course. The didactic coursework will need to be completed, and you'll attest that you've either attended the lectures or, when you've missed one, watched the recorded videos. Sitting for that written test is something that can happen at the American Society of Pain and Neuroscience annual meeting, or hopefully at some of our offsite or off-cycle meetings, like midyear meetings and potentially even ISPN.

We hope that you will sign up for a procedural certification, and when you do that, we'll pair you up with a mentor for that procedure. There will be three things for you to complete with that mentor. You'll attend a peer-to-peer site visit with that mentor. We'll assign you to the mentor and hopefully have them within a couple hours of your practice, and it's very important that you work with them to coordinate a time where you can meet. After you've completed that mentorship visit, you'll also have selected a couple cases of the procedure that you're going to be certified in.

The certification will happen also at an annual or off-cycle ASPN meeting, where you'll have an observed structured clinical examination in a cadaver lab with one of our lead mentors, who will be doing the test-out to make sure that you follow the critical steps that show that you understand how to safely and effectively perform that procedure. The OSCE, however, cannot be scheduled or completed until you've had your site visit with your mentor and completed two cases in which you've both had a pre-operative discussion as well as a post-operative debrief with your mentor. You will fill out an attestation form that states that you've completed those two things, as well as some details about the cases that you've completed, and your mentor will also attest to those things.

We feel that the rigor of this process is very critical to our ability to provide a certification of completion that shows that you fulfilled the components of the program, and that you then can have the certification associated with that individual procedure.

You can still sit for the written test at the annual meeting if you have not completed your OSCE, but you will have a total of two years from time of registration to complete the procedural certification steps as well as the OSCE. The following year, after you've completed that procedural OSCE, you can re-enroll for an additional procedure. If you're with the same mentor for that procedure, you will not need another mentorship site visit, but can go straight into the pre- and post-visit, at the discretion of the mentor.

If you have any questions, we hope that you'll reach out to the leadership team at ASPN or to me, because we're happy to make sure that you have all the information as you prepare to undertake this important educational process, which we've already seen provide value for the couple dozen people that came through our first year. Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you as a program enrollee. We look forward to the application. Thank you.