The stakes involved in continuing medical education, or CME, couldn’t be higher—for practitioners, CME coordinators, and society as a whole. You know this better than anyone, as you’re an education professional whose job is to develop and evolve effective learning programs and deliver them to key audiences correctly.
Given the diversity in the medical profession, it’s hard to have learning options at the proper levels for everyone. With fields of medicine changing so rapidly due to advances in biotechnology, the challenge of staying current and relevant is steep. It seems like there are new therapies for existing conditions practically every day.
Emerging new technology is helping simplify the challenge. A learning management system streamlines the process of building strong and evolving CME offerings and does so in a single platform. This system enables you to develop certain best practices for desired CME learner outcomes. Helping members reach their goals and requirements for continued education can only strengthen the healthcare profession and contribute to a healthier population.
With the right tools deployed, you can find ways to streamline your process and produce more satisfied learners.
Best Practices for Desired CME Learner Outcomes Start with Needs Assessments
Being customer and client focused is arguably the most crucial step in delivering effective CME programs. You need to know what services your members need before you can decide how to deliver them.
Historically, that’s been difficult and time consuming to do, if only because of the types of data that you need in order to draw conclusions and tailor your offerings for your members. Learning how to write excellent objectives for CME is also crucial.
The right data-collection tools are commonly understood. For example, surveys and assessments of learners can provide insights into members for whom you need to tailor programming. Learning management systems can simplify and streamline the process of creating those surveys and assessments, tracking the data collection, and analyzing your success and effectiveness.
Ultimately, a centralized LMS enables you to easily personalize and tailor surveys and assessments in order to find out what’s on the minds of your learners. From the results, you can draw numerous conclusions. Are you addressing the right subjects? What are completion rates? Are they going up or going down? Being able to assess where everyone stands by using a digital LMS is one of the best practices for desired CME learner outcomes.
Learner Engagement
A big necessity for online CME programs—and any CME program—is the ability to interact, encourage participation, and engage with learners. Many have found that getting the most out of the connected world requires two-way interactions. It’s no longer about lectures that drone on and on. You want to maintain a dialogue with your learners, not a monologue.
Building and nurturing effective engagement allows you to take the pulse of your learners almost every day and encourage them to learn from each other and challenge themselves. You can increase and speed learning retention through interactive features like quizzes, polls, and group discussions.
A learning management system helps make that challenge more manageable. From a centralized location, your instructors can create the types of engaging materials that they feel would work best for their target learners. These don’t have to just be surveys and quizzes. LMS solutions also enable instructors to integrate multimedia into their programs. From a single screen, they can add videos, podcasts, live teleconferences, and other types of media, even guest speakers, to enrich the learning experience.
360-Degree Feedback Loop
Think of utilizing best practices for desired CME learner outcomes as offering opportunities for a feedback loop. Every time you start a class, you can learn more about what works and what doesn’t.
That requires a commitment to measuring outcomes, which in turn, means paying close attention to the data. Learning management for CME programs makes it easy to get your hands on that data, giving you the information that you need to improve your offerings.
With smart, strategic thinking, you can compile learning objectives and then configure tools to measure how well you have done. The types of data that may be relevant to your challenge include:
- Completion rates
- Assessment scores
- Cost-effectiveness
- Changes effectuated by the learning
Measuring outcomes can significantly impact desired CME learning success.
Better Outcomes with EthosCE by Cadmium
Learning management system technology has become a significant tool in helping drive CME effectiveness. Its features and benefits help keep doctors and nurses current, which in turn, helps improve population health.
EthosCE from Cadmium is designed to address the unique learning requirements of the medical profession by including digital features that enable you to create, educate, learn, and assess in the CME space.
At Cadmium, 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.
