Continuing medical education (CME) helps primary care physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals learn new skills, stay up to date on emerging protocols, and meet regulatory or employer requirements.
But challenges remain for delivering CME at scale.
Despite growth in this field, closures and time burden constraints have reduced CME activity over the past decade. To ensure success with your programs, you need to avoid common mistakes to deliver powerful and impactful content.
Seven Common Mistakes in Delivering CME
Here are common mistakes when delivering education for adult learners in the medical profession.
1. Technology at the Expense of Content
Content is king. You should have valuable educational material that healthcare professionals value and use to gain additional insight. Unfortunately, many providers focus more energy on technology to deliver courses than the CME content.
Remember that not everyone is technically adept. Technology should facilitate learning and not be a barrier. As such, an intuitive, easy-to-use CME platform is crucial to accentuate—and not overshadow—learning.
2. Failure to Engage Learners
If the material being presented is dry or the presentation is uninspired, it is not likely to produce the outcomes that you want. Focusing on passive learning, such as lectures and slideshows, may impart important information but fail to engage an audience. Make sure to include interactive elements, discussions, multimedia, and engaging assessment tools.
3. Irrelevant Content
A common mistake is failing to turn abstract ideas into real-life situations. People learn best when the material is relevant and they understand that what they are learning will help them on the job, improve patient outcomes, or progress in their careers.
4. Information Overload
Effective CME focuses on specific learning objectives and outcomes. Avoid making the mistake of doing data dumps and information overload. Focus instead on key learnings. A highly-concentrated focus on a single set of objectives will yield greater results.
5. Lack of Assessments
Without assessments, it’s difficult to know whether the CME activity met objectives or provided relevant learnings for participants.
6. Incomplete or Missing Feedback
Besides testing whether learners gained the requisite knowledge from courses, learners need to provide feedback on the content, format, and effectiveness of the CME. This helps ensure value and provides the honest information that course creators need to improve future iterations.
7. Failure to Report Results
To close the loop and ensure that CME objectives are being met, you need an easy and effective way to track and report results. Too many programs fail to deliver the data needed for validation.
How EthosCE Helps Overcome Challenges in Delivering Quality CME
EthosCE is the leading learning management system (LMS) for medical associations, academic medical centers, health systems, and medical education companies.
Ease of Use
The platform is easy to use and navigate, removing any technological stigma or concerns that adult learners may have. For course creators and administrators, much of the work is automated to streamline the workload. Features include:
- Automated attendance tracking
- Self-service certificates for course completion
- Complete CME lifecycle management
These tools reduce the manual workload and enable course creators to focus more effort on the content that they are delivering rather than the tools that they are using.
Interactive Tools and Assessments
Interactive tools keep adult learners engaged. With EthosCE, you can create true-false, multiple-choice, essay, and other types of participation and assessment tools. You can also embed videos and create multimedia questions for assessments.
These interactive tools foster engagement and help keep learners focused on critical takeaways. Assessments also provide valuable information about whether courses are delivering on objectives or if you need to review materials.
Reporting and Analytics
A built-in business intelligence solution enables you to track learner engagement in individual courses and view an overview of your entire CME portfolio. You can easily drill down into reports for a more in-depth understanding of learner behavior. These reports can be visualized, shared, or downloaded.
Ethos also adds reporting to JA-PARS to match your schedule so you can include course records. This includes:
- PARS-compliant reports and integration with ACCME web services, including ABA, ABIM, ABP MOC 2 programs
- Automated reporting to boards and other external systems, including ACCME PARS, CE Broker, and CPE Monitor
This simplifies your reporting tasks while ensuring that you remain compliant with industry regulations and client expectations.
EthosCE Learning Management System for CME
EthosCE LMS has been specifically designed to automate, streamline, and reduce the costs associated with delivering live and enduring CME activities. It has built-in content management and social media features that enable organizations to create full-featured websites with custom registration, course delivery, CME assessments and certificates, and 24/7 web-based reporting.
With EthosCE, it’s easy to avoid these common mistakes and build CME programs that deliver powerful outcomes.
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.
