Much like the BCPS exam, the BCACP (Board Certified Ambulatory Care Pharmacist) exam is undergoing changes for the fall of 2020. (If you are looking for a breakdown of the BCPS 2020 Changes, find them here.) BCACP exam changes likely include a significantly greater emphasis on ambulatory care and clinical topics. This is a welcomed change in my opinion. Pharmacists will need to be at the top of their clinical pharmacy game to be able to most effectively work with their respective healthcare teams.

BCACP Exam Changes – The Details

For reference, here’s the OLD content outline for the exam: (directly quoted from the BPS website)

1. Patient-Centered Care: Ambulatory Care Pharmacotherapy (37 percent of examination)
2. Patient-Centered Care: Collaboration and Patient Advocacy (29 percent of examination)
3. Translation of Evidence into Practice (14 percent of examination)
4. Practice Models and Policy (14 percent of examination)
5. Population and Public Health (6 percent of examination)

Here’s the updated content outline starting in the fall of 2020:

1. Patient-Centered Ambulatory Care (75% of examination)
2. Translation of Evidence into Ambulatory Care Practice (15% of examination)
3. Ambulatory Care Practice Advancement (10% of examination)

I would strongly encourage you to review the official content outline and develop a personalized plan.

Preparing a Plan for the BCACP Exam Changes

As you can see from the new BCACP content outline, BPS just went with the terminology of Patient-Centered Ambulatory Care as the main umbrella for many different topics. This is 75% of the exam! However, this does NOT mean that 75% of the exam is pharmacotherapy knowledge. Just one look at the topics listed should help you understand this fact.

Patient-Centered Ambulatory Care includes topics such as interviewing skills (i.e. motivational interviewing), communication, education, patient-specific factors that may affect the medication experience (i.e. adherence, health beliefs, literacy, etc.).

In our study material, we do not overlook these topics and regardless of whether or not you use our content for the BCACP exam, you should not overlook this either!

Do Not Overlook Statistics

Translation of Evidence into Ambulatory Care Practice is 15% of the exam. You could get up to 15-25 statistics, regulatory, and/or research-based questions. This could easily make or break your exam. Be sure to put in some time reviewing these topics.

Ambulatory Care Practice Advancement

In my opinion, this is probably one of the more challenging topics to prepare for. Anything from collaboration, education, interprofessional collaboration, business development, billing in ambulatory care, or strategies for providing feedback could be asked in these questions. We’ve done our best to cover a lot of these miscellaneous topics in our regulatory section of the BCACP All Access Pass.

What to do When You Don’t Know the Answer

Unless you actually wrote the BCACP exam, there will be questions that you just aren’t sure about. When I run into questions like this, I try very hard to narrow the answer down to the two best answers. When I do this, it allows me to feel like I at least have a 50% shot of getting the answer correct. That isn’t terrible odds compared to a 1/4 chance.

I hope this helps you better prepare to pass your BCACP exam!