Planning Accredited Continuing Medical
Education (CME) Conferences for Physicians
Target Audience: Educational planners,
consisting of physician planners and administrative professionals who plan CME
meetings for physicians.
Program Overview: This course is designed to train
educational planner in developing programs
that are designed to address clinical practice gaps, which medical
professionals can utilize to improve patient care
Program Objectives:
After completion of the
program, participants will be able to:
- Recognize the
Importance of CME (ACCME Handouts)
- Understand what
clinical gaps are and how they might affect patient care
- Identify and
utilize websites that are sources to identify competency requirements to
identify clinical gaps
- Recognize and
Implement the Accreditation Criteria of the ACCME
Handouts:
Accountable to the Public
(ACCME)
Examples of Profesisonal
Practice Gap – ACCME Video
Accreditation Criteria
- http://accme.org/requirements/accreditation-requirements-cme-providers/accreditation-criteria
Wiki Assignment:
After completing the online course, student groups
must develop a Wiki site to demonstrate their understanding of the principles presented. 10
points maximum.
Based upon the contents of this online course,
group members must develop a Wiki that can be utilized as an assessment of the
course materials. This should cover relevant ACCME Criteria presented in the
course. Develop a combination of 10
multiple choice, Yes/No, and open-ended questions to assess knowledge gained
after completion of the course. Be creative and interactive. It is desirable to
provide participants immediate feedback,
if possible.
Grading Rubric - 10 Points Maximum
9-10
|
7-8
|
5-6
|
3-4
|
1-2
|
All ACCME criteria presented were
addressed.
Layout was appealing with appropriate
graphics
Appropriate Questions were drafted
Assessment was formulated to allow
immediate feedback
Information was clearly presented
|
Most ACCME criteria presented were
addressed.
Layout was appealing with appropriate
graphics
Appropriate Questions were drafted
Assessment was formulated to allow
immediate feedback
Information was clearly presented
|
Some ACCME criteria presented were
addressed.
Appropriate Questions were drafted
Assessment was formulated to allow
immediate feedback
Information was clearly presented
|
Some ACCME criteria presented were
addressed.
Appropriate Questions were drafted
Assessment was completed
|
Activity was completed
Some ACCME criteria presented were
addressed.
Questions were drafted
|
References:
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Page 1
CME at Loyola
University Medical Center
A Primer for CME Course Directors
Understanding ACCME's Updated Criteria
for Accreditation
This module is meant to educate CME Course Directors at Stritch on the
educational theory
and planning processes required for compliance with ACCME's updated criteria
for accrediting Continuing Medical Education.
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Page 2
Driving Force in
CME
The driving force in contemporary CME is the
data that suggests that contemporary health care is not measuring up to expectations in terms of desired health outcomes.
Actual care lags behind expected or
desired care.
There is a performance gap!
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Page 3
CME as an Ecosystem
The ACCME (Accreditation Council for
Continuing Medical Education) invites CME providers to play an important role in helping to
narrow the performance gaps of practicing clinicians. In the contemporary health care
environment, CME needs to serve as a "change agent" - an ecosystem linked to professional
practice that is meant to:
- Change behaviors to
- Enhance performance to
- Improve Patient Outcomes
for the sake of continuous quality
improvement in health care delivery.
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Page 4
Historical
Perspective CME traditionally was an activity
directed to the exchange of information and the transmission of knowledge.
Licensure, specialty certification and
hospital credentialing demanded a system that assured the ongoing acquisition of knowledge by practicing clinicians.
For this type of CME activity,
educators simply asked themselves "What interesting topic should we
lecture on?"
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Page 5
Today...
Contemporary health care is vastly
more complex.
Consequently CME needs to be more
focused and purposeful.
Clinicians must not only know, they
must know how to, and they must do well whatever is called for by
the patients they treat.
CME today must play a role at all three
levels...
- Transmitting knowledge
- Enhancing competence
- Improving performance
for the sake of improved patient
outcomes (quality improvement).
CME has a stake in providing clinicians with
not only knowledge but practical and targeted strategies that can change
behavior and enhance performance in everyday practice.
Providers of continuing medical education
are now being challenged to ask their learners:
- "What do you plan to do
with the new information you have been given?"
- "What will you do
differently in your practice?
- "Has doing so made a
difference in your patients' health?"
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Page 6
What ACCME
requires...
Planning your CME
Event:
Performance Gap Analysis
Determination of Educational Needs
Setting your Goals for the Activity
Stating your Learning Objectives |
Developing your
Educational Activity
Creating Evidence-based
content
Choosing your Educational Format (lecture, discussion, role play, panel,
simulation activity)
Assuring independence from Commercial Support (disclosure, resolving conflict
of interest) |
Analyzing the Impact
of your Activity
Gathering information on changes
in knowledge, confidence, intent to change practice, measure performance |
| Setting your Plan for
the Future to Address Ongoing Gaps, and Educational Needs |
These requirements are reflected in
each of the steps of the Application that you submit for approval of your CME
Activity.
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Page 7
Step I: Planning
Your CME Event
Practice Gap Analysis and Assessing the
Needs of Your Learners
Why am I doing this educational
activity?
This is the critical question that should be the starting point for any CME
activity.
In the answer to this question lies the
relevance of your activity to the needs of your audience,
and the potential for effecting change
in your learner's performance.
CME planners should query themselves
in the following fashion:
- What problem (in clinical practice) do we want to
address?
- Is this a significant problem for our learners?
- What is the magnitude of the problem? (so you can track
outcome improvement)
- Why does the problem exist?
- What change do we seek?
- What should we do to make change happen?
This is the part of educational
planning that is about practice gap analysis and needs assessment.
Practice gaps are expressions or
manifestations of a need on the part of the clinicians who are your learners.
You are encouraged to investigate real
practice gaps and practice-based needs for your activity by taking advantage of
internal and external sources of performance data:
- Performance databases and web sites (i.e., AHQR)
- Input and Feedback from your Learners
- Institutional Performance Data and Benchmarks
- Practice-Based Audits
Having identified and quantified a practice
gap that you wish to address in your activity, you reflect on the educational
needs that underlie the problem.
The need may be a need for new information,
but it may be a need to provide clinicians with practical strategies,
behavioral skills, or system improvement information.
These needs must be given consideration in
your educational planning of CME.
You are then expected to develop and
articulate concrete learning objectives linked to the needs you have
identified among your learners.
This process has a funneling effect going
from broad and general to more specific:
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Page 8
Step II: Designing
your CME activity
Developing Your Content and Choosing
an Effective Educational Format
Having selected the educational needs that
you will address, you then develop the evidence-based content and choose the
format of your activity.
The traditional CME activity targets
knowledge-based needs and then, typically, employs a lecture as the educational
delivery format.
But when seeking to address learners' needs
that are more performance-based, might not learning activities that are more
hands-on
such as simulations, role play, panel discussions be called for?
We invite you to consider including
more dynamic learning formats into your CME activities where appropriate.
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Page 9
Step III: Assuring
the Integrity of the Educational Process
"The concepts of independence from
industry and collaboration with industry in the development of CME content are mutually
exclusive.
Although commercial interests may provide commercial support for educational
activities as defined by the ACCME's Standards for Commercial Support,
there is no role for ACCME-defined commercial interests in the
content-planning, development or evaluation of accredited CME activities."
(ACCME)
This defines the
"independence" of CME.
The steps required by ACCME to assure
independence from commercial support included:
- Providing disclosures for all
planners, reviewers, and speakers for your activity
- Making disclosure to the
audience (either verbally, or in written form)
- Resolving all conflicts of
interest prior to the activity
- Processing all monetary sources
according to ACCME standards
- Managing vendors and exhibits
according to ACCME standards*
*Loyola University Medical
Center, as a not-for-profit entity, does not allow vendors or exhibits on-site
during CME events (PS 11)
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Page 10
Step IV: Assessing
the Impact of Your Activity
You began the process of planning your CME
activity by exploring the practice gaps relevant to your learners and
choosing a performance area that you wished to address.
You identified the learning needs of your
targeted audience related to that clinical problem and then developed the
learning objectives that you wished to focus on in your CME event.
You tailored the learning environment and
the educational format of your activity to be the most effective means for
participants to learn what they needed.
You put on your event, meeting or conference
and hopefully it all goes successfully!
But at this point you really don't
know whether you've accomplished your goal.
You still have a responsibility to evaluate
the impact of your activity.
The goal is to see whether you enhanced the
learners confidence or competence, changed their practice behaviors, or
impacted
health outcomes in their patient populations.
The Office of CME at Stritch works with you
to gather data related to these types of outcomes, in order to get information
on the impact
of your activity.
This process fulfills the Plan, Do, Study,
Act cycle espoused by Deming et al. that should govern all activities.
- Plan: You are aware of a practice
based problem, and have come up with an educational intervention to help
address the problem.
- Do: You put on the educational
activity hoping to impart knowledge, change behaviors, improve
performance, impact health outcomes.
- Study: You collect information to
analyze whether you were successful or not.
Self Assessment Test
Correct Answer is...B.
We thank you for taking the time to
learn what we believe is relevant for you know as a CME Course Director...
[Please proceed to the final page to
check your grasp of this material]
--
Conclusion:
Whew, this was most challenging, given the short amount of time for completion and my ignorance in creating lesson plans and designing a blog!! Sorry, it's not more eye-appealing. Hopefully, it's somewhere in the ballpark of the stated assignment. Sigh...
