Substantiating Interventional Pulmonology as a New Internal Medicine Subspecialty

May 30, 2023

In a letter to the Review Committee for Internal Medicine within the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) joined the Association of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Program Directors (APCCMPD) and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) in providing recommendations to the requirements needed to formalize interventional pulmonology (IP) as a subspecialty of internal medicine.

The joint letter provides comments on program requirements, as they may impact pulmonary disease and combined pulmonary critical care medicine (PCCM) fellowship programs, and comments to clarify the distinction of the new subspecialty.

Other recommendations shared in the letter include:

• We recommend strengthening language to clearly define the roles and relationships between the pulmonary or combined PCCM program directors and IP program directors. The following language can be considered: “The IP program director must be responsible for the IP program and ensure that all ACGME accreditation requirements are met without negative impact to the pulmonary disease or the combined pulmonary disease and critical care medicine program.”
• To ensure that the educational needs of the pulmonary or combined PCCM fellows are not negatively impacted by the presence of subsubspecialty IP fellows, we recommend acknowledging the inherent overlap in training, education outcomes, and competency pathways among the subspecialties. This can be achieved through a new core requirement (I.E.1) ensuring that the pulmonary disease or combined PCCM fellows are not adversely affected.

Read the full 2023 letter to ACGME.

With a history of advocating for IP as a subspecialty, CHEST also issued a formal letter in 2021 encouraging the ACGME to recognize IP as a new subspecialty.