The American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) uses virtual patients (VP) in Maintenance of Certification. Theoretically, the ABFM could score users on the value of information (VOI) in their queries. Pharyngitis, a prototypical primary care topic, appears practically intractable to VOI scoring. Problems include conflicting goals of various stakeholders and strong regional and temporal variability in disease characteristics. Nevertheless, the analysis yielded insights that may shift, or validate, the ABFM's selection of scoring criteria.