Physicians and other healthcare professionals require access to various learning programs, including certifications for new practitioners and recertifications for established clinicians. But they often have time constraints in their personal and professional lives, so they need access to quality learning that fits into their schedules. Whether they can achieve this depends on your CME programs and how well they perform.
This blog post provides four tips for better performance from CME.
1. Identify Your Learners' Knowledge Gaps
CME must be tailored to identify gaps in your learners’ knowledge. This means first identifying learner knowledge through assessments like questionnaires or test scores from your CME course training or board exams. It’s best to study the gaps using clinical practice guidelines, as these can significantly affect patient outcomes.
A knowledge gap refers to lacking certain information, whether in knowledge, skill, or practice. Ask these questions about the surrounding deficits:
- Does the individual not know about a particular subject (for example, the long-term use of benzodiazepines)?
- Is the practitioner unaware of how something should be done, such as how to show leadership within a clinical practice, hospital department, or hospital itself?
- Do clinicians need to learn how to do a specific activity, such as advising surgical patients about pain management with the drugs that they've prescribed?
Here’s what you can do as a CME professional to eliminate knowledge gaps:
- Identify the problem.
- Understand why the problem exists.
- Create educational objectives to address the gaps as you develop your content.
- Design your activities to coincide with your understanding of why the gaps exist.
- Evaluate your activities, and ask yourself if you've successfully addressed the problems.
You’ll need to develop your CME activities to address your clinicians' knowledge gaps for successful outcomes.
2. Set Objectives for Your Learners' Needs
What do your learners need from your CME to help them learn what's relevant to them? You've already determined if any gaps exist, so it's time to set objectives that meet your learners’ needs. Develop CME that provides them with the educational tools that they require to be successful. First, create a statement describing the knowledge, skills, and abilities that participants will gain from the educational activity. Then, ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you want them to learn?
- How well should they do it?
- What are the expected knowledge results from the activities that you're planning?
- What skill(s) should clinicians be able to do? How well should they do them?
- Will they increase their ability to perform specific tasks?
Now that you've established your objectives, you’ll need to determine the best approach to accomplishing them.
3. Provide Your Learners with Interactive Content
Medical professionals are always looking for content that enables them to fulfill their annual certification and recertification requirements. You've already established their learning needs regarding goals for getting them there. But how have they been learning to this point? To get the best performance from your CME, you’ll need to know where you want to go next regarding your courses' content.
Gone are the days of didactic learning alone. While this method of learning works for some people, it is typically unsuccessful because different learners have varied learning styles.
When moving away from traditional learning, look at interactive content. Offer virtual events with live Q&A sessions between learners and presenters, along with added networking components, moderated Twitter chats, LinkedIn posts, breakout rooms for small discussion groups, and gamification to provide competition.
4. Use an LMS That Enables You to Offer CME for Successful Learner Outcomes
To set up your learners for success—and to analyze their learning—look for an LMS that gives you these capabilities. An enterprise-level technology platform should supply you with the tools to produce interactive content that addresses your learners' various learning needs.
EthosCE is an LMS that can help you with your CME performance. It enables you to create multimedia content in the form of live-streaming video, audio content, written materials, and enduring materials from various activities, including:
- Seminars
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Conferences
- Symposia
- Annual meetings
- Focus groups
- Advisory boards
- Steering committees
- Grand rounds
- Regularly scheduled series
- Tumor boards
EthosCE provides you with the means to achieve better performance from your CME. You can create quality courses and track your learners' success, which results in better clinical outcomes. To ensure authentic learning, use your multimedia content in assessments through multiple choice or true/false questions. You can also analyze your clinicians at every step of their educational journey.
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.
