Electrocardiography

Abstract

Two most frequent complaints of test takers for the electrocardiography (ECG) section of the board exam were that they did not have enough time and that they did not know the answer options (and therefore they ended up wasting a lot of time looking for the answers that they wanted on the answer options page!). Even if you get everything else on the board exam right, if you fail the ECG section, you still fail the boards. This is the most important part of your board exam. If you don’t know the answers, then move on and come back to it. You must KNOW how to diagnose the answers on the answer options list. We recommend that you practice coding a set of ECG’s in a timed session using the ABIM answer options list (There are typically 37 ECG’s in one 2-h session, that's an average of 3.2 min/ECG). Pay special attention to the brief description of the patient. They contain invaluable clues to diagnoses.

You can find the answer option lists on the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) official website, http://www.abim.org/, under the tab, “take the exam your complete guide,” then under the “Prepare for the Exam: Take the Tutorial” section, near the bottom is a pdf file called “Sample Cases - Electrocardiograms and Imaging Studies (pdf).” Pay extra attention to the last few pages, which explains the scoring of sample cases.