PARS V3 Web Service Reporter Upgrade Changes: 3/4/22

In early 2021 ACCME announced an enhancement upgrade to the PARS and JA PARS (Program and Activity Reporting System). The ACCME PARS Web Service allows external systems, like EthosCE, to dynamically open and update ACCME Activity records.

The product development team at EthosCE has been eager to provide any and all available enhancements to our ACCME PARS web service reporting add-on to help customers leverage the latest and greatest features PARS has to offer.

Since the upgraded PARS experience officially launched, the EthosCE product team has been vigorously working to integrate these changes and enhancements to our PARS web service reporting add-on. Unfortunately, we have uncovered many issues and bugs in the new PARS web service, which has significantly delayed our release of the latest changes.

PARS web service backward compatibility issues

During early research and development, our product team had been assured the upcoming PARS upgrade and customer migrations would ensure 100% backward compatibility. Meaning PARS customers and EthosCE PARS web service reporting customers would be able to continue executing their current reporting operations uninterrupted and gracefully move towards adopting the new PARS platform when ready.

Almost immediately after our PARS migration assistance initiative, it became apparent the new PARS was not operating with 100% backward compatibility. Many of our valued partners submitted bug reports, error messages, and concerns.

ACCME PARS + EthosCE technical communication

Following the PARS migration blackout period, EthosCE submitted upwards of 50+ known issues our customers were experiencing while using the PARS web service add-on as well as performing manual reporting .csv and XML upload tasks.

ACCME PARS and EthosCE worked together diligently to mitigate new bugs and issue reports in the hope of providing the same quality of service our shared customers expect.

EthosCE PARS web service reporter add-on upgrade

In January 2022, it became clear that backward compatibility for legacy PARS reporting features would not be resolved anytime soon. Our product development team immediately prioritized the work to upgrade our ACCME PARS web service reporting add-on to meet the latest specifications released on the PARS software. EthosCE version 7.54 includes the latest changes featured in the new PARS & JA PARS. The latest PARS & JA PARS web service reporting add-on changes are noted below:

New changes

• Activity description is now required.

• The addition of an ‘IPCE’ activity field is now required.

• New ‘measured outcomes' field. This replaces the 'competency’ fields.

• Specialty values for ABP, ABPath need to be updated as per the new JA PARS doc.

• New list of ‘activity format' selections.

• Updated ‘pricing’ field labels changed.

• New ‘Variable’ option added to pricing field.

• New 3 year limit on enduring activities.  Additional date validation has been added to the PARS & JA PARS user interface to support this. 

• Support for multiple MOC boards.

• Support for multiple joint providers.

Deprecated changes

• The ‘Instruction hours’ field has been removed.

• The ‘Objectives and competencies’ checkboxes have been removed.

• Activity types ‘other’, ‘subcategory’, and ‘other subcategory’ have been removed.

• ‘Self-Assessment Module’ has been removed.

• The ‘reporting year’ field has been removed.

• The ‘organization ID’ field has been removed.

• The ‘competency’ fields have been removed and replaced. See the list of the new changes above.

• EthosCE will no longer create multiple activity entries in PARS to reflect multi-year activities. Previously, EthosCE created an activity entry for each reporting year.

• The ‘commercial support’ field has been removed.

UX Enhancements

• New field group collections were added on the ACCME configuration tab.

• Streamlined editing experience enhancements added.

Known issues/ongoing bugs

1. Multiple ‘profession’ selections are causing failed activity submissions. Currently, The PARS & JA PARS web service V3 will not report activities for certain professions. Existing activities will fail to report. PARS has not yet published documentation with explicit ‘profession’ requirements (ACCME released a fix on 3/14/22). To submit an activity successfully, admins must uncheck all other professions for the activity to report.

Open

2. Adding multiple contributors causes no ‘inkind’ values to submit successfully. Currently, admins should only add a single monetary contributor in order for ‘inkind’ values to submit successfully (ACCME released a fix on 3/14/22).

Open

3. Learner counts do not successfully submit for Athletic Trainers. Batch uploads and web service submissions to PARS currently do not update learner counts for Athletic Trainers (ACCME released a fix on 3/14/22).

4. Practice selections submit successfully, but do not show in the PARS user interface. When selecting a profession other than ‘Pharmacy’ or ‘Pharmacy Technician’, and the ‘Pharmacy activity type’ selection of ‘Practice’, none of the values show up in the PARS user interface after record submission. However, records will be successfully submitted without an error.

5. MOC approval ‘ self-assessment’ no longer reporting for existing activities. The ‘Self-Assessment’ MOC approval selection must be unselected to submit existing activities successfully. (ACCME released a fix on 3/14/22)

6. Enduring activity submission duplicates when submitting a multi-year activity. Previously, when submitting an enduring multi-year activity, EthosCE would create an activity instance for each reporting year (as required by PARS). PARS no longer requires the reporting year for enduring activities and no longer requires an activity instance for each reporting year. With the EthosCE 7.54 release, the EthosCE PARS & JA PARS web service reporting add-on will no longer create an activity instance for each reporting year. For existing activities which have already been submitted only the first activity matching the reporting year will receive submission updates. Please contact info@accme.org for further instructions on removing extra enduring activity submissions.

7. Error 9999 in PARS MOC reporting is caused by selecting any "Learner/Team Performance" measured outcome. Removing that specific outcome can be used as a workaround until ACCME deploys a fix for this issue (ACCME released a fix on 3/14/22).

8. Error 458, Error 469: Provider ActivityID is invalid. A major bug in the PARS + JA PARS v3 web service was found and reported by EthosCE. The PARS webservice bug returns incorrect ActivityID data including the wrong Activity Type when querying the PARS webservice to add activities or update existing activities. As a workaround: use a different provider ID than the existing activity, or, delete the existing activity if the activity type was incorrect and re-save the course in EthosCE. This bug was reported to ACCME as of 3/23/22.

Report bugs

Please report errors and reporting bugs directly to info@accme.org.