| Upcoming Mandatory Training for MoCA Testing

Since our test’s conception back in 1996, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test has earned national and worldwide recognition as a leading cognitive screening instrument for early detection of mild cognitive impairment.

It is for our growing community of healthcare professionals that we are now requiring training and certification for test use. In an effort to reduce variability and ensure the highest accuracy, our training and certification program will become mandatory as of September 1, 2019. You will have one year to complete your training and certification. After September 1st 2020, access to the test will be restricted to certified raters only.

This recommendation for mandatory training also comes after receiving legal threats from patients and families who disagree with their physician diagnosis based on the test, claiming that their rater is not trained to administer and interpret the test, and that we ought to be responsible for making sure that clinicians are well trained. Our legal team also advised us that we should restrict access to the test to certified users only.

Certification takes just 1 hour and is essential for more accurate patient care. The process is standardized so that testing is consistent amongst multiple raters, making you more confident in the way you administer, score, and interpret tests. This helps minimize errors, and thus minimizes liability and misdiagnosis.

Institutional licensing and group accounts are available. Funds collected from training and certification help support test development, updates, user support, electronic application, and MoCA related research including Mini MoCA Test (5 min), MoCA ACE normative data study, MoCA self-test, and MoCA for subjects with hearing and visual impairment.

Become certified and continue using the most sensitive cognitive screening tool in both paper and app format.