Addressing the Challenges of CME Effectiveness

addressing challenges of cme effectiveness

As a CME professional, you face many daily challenges in providing an evolving platform for CME for doctors. The requirements for learners are often steep, though they vary by state and jurisdiction. Most doctors must complete fifty hours of CME every two years to retain their medical licenses. The pressure is on for you to deliver relevant programs that can meet those requirements.

Due to increased specialization and more geographically dispersed locations in large systems, challenges range from delivering personalized learning to accessibility, convenience, and cost-effectiveness. Technology is helping provide CME coordinators with new ways of managing these challenges—in particular, deploying a learning management system (LMS).

Here are a few ways that you can benefit from using an LMS for CMS delivery, taking a bit of the stress out of your job so you can better serve the doctors who need your creativity and enthusiasm for their futures.

Personalized Learning

Medical learning needs should never be considered “one size fits all.” The field has so many specialties, and there are many different requirements to fulfill. Some seek specialized know-how, while others are just beginning their journeys.

Without the flexibility and agility that a robust LMS provides, you may find it challenging to offer customized learning paths and associated assessments. But customization is the holy grail in the CME field. Tailoring learning paths to the needs of individual professionals—letting them choose the right content, format, and timing to meet their needs—is the most ideal of situations.

Emerging capabilities enable an LMS to operate almost like an online streaming service or shopping service: by using machine learning to understand your preferences and suggest learning paths and potential courses based on your previous patterns. EthosCE, for instance, can store and access podcasts, videos, written content, and more. Educators can tap into this database to structure the type of class that they want to offer, so there’s no need to start from scratch each time.

Accessibility/Convenience

During the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and organizations have learned a great deal about the importance and value of being flexible and agile in a rapidly changing, uncertain world. The healthcare industry is no different. Today’s medical professionals have many obstacles when selecting the best course of action to achieve in a CME environment. Their challenge dovetails with yours: how to make classes convenient for everyone.

This is increasingly difficult as the healthcare profession continues to consolidate, creating mega healthcare systems with professionals across time zones and specialties. One pathway to accessibility in CME is focusing on the core concept of anytime, anywhere education. EthosCE includes essential capabilities that enable learners to access classes on the go through their choice of device, a functionality that’s desired and expected in this day and age. You can partially enable these capabilities through centralized learning resources. Once you have the content that you need and know how you want to deliver it, formatting it so it’s responsive to multiple devices becomes much more doable.

EthosCE also supports flexible learning paths. Use the LMS to create options like group courses, which can track completions and send reminders. The more flexible you can be in addressing challenges of CME effectiveness, the better off you will be.

The Administrative Challenges of CME Effectiveness

One area that assists in addressing CME effectiveness is compliance with requirements for CME credits. An effective LMS like EthosCE includes features like being able to create learning transcripts and credit tracking. With course validation, learners can stay on track with their learning requirements and the challenge of producing the correct documentation.

With the proper proof, you can stay caught up on your CME requirements and avoid a crisis with deadlines approaching. EthosCE helpfully provides automated reminders and notifications to learners so they can stay on track. For auditing purposes, the system can also quickly produce data on completion rates and assess data on outcomes to evaluate course effectiveness, enabling you to develop a culture of continuous improvement. Aligning your learning objectives with assessments will help keep your learners progressing.

Administratively, an LMS like EthosCE supports your role as CME coordinator by helping reduce expenses and manage budget, logistics, and staffing. With the right system in place, you can be sure you are efficiently addressing challenges of CME effectiveness.

Addressing Challenges of CME Effectiveness with EthosCE

EthosCE provides CME capabilities to medical associations, medical education companies, universities, and healthcare organizations. This technology solution is built to provide a leveled-up user experience, comply with ACCME guidelines, reduce administrative costs, and demonstrate measurable outcomes.

The many benefits include:

  • Automated attendance tracking of RSS/Grand Rounds via mobile phones
  • Self-serve certificates
  • Support for multiple credit types
  • Unlimited certificate templates
  • Commitment to change and follow-up assessment instruments
  • PARS-compliant reports and integration with ACCME web services, including ABA, ABIM, ABP MOC 2 programs

At EthosCE, we understand the challenges of creating effective CME programming. We also know how critical it is to find effective ways to make an impact on learners in a busy, modern world. Contact us today to learn more.