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As the continuing education director, do you know if your courses are relevant, full of innovation, and always evolving?
Ask yourself: “Am I aware of what my learners are looking for and what they need?” If their needs aren’t met, you might just see them finding another provider to gain their CE.
Time is of the essence because they already have enough on their plates, with their practices and work in medical facilities.
You already know that quality CE is vital to your medical professionals, especially when it comes to increasing their satisfaction. Fortunately, there’s a technology platform that helps you address your clinicians’ pain points.
In this ebook, we’ve put together the ways you can improve your CE program for your healthcare professionals overall satisfaction.
There are so many different things that your medical professionals want and need. They want to refine their skills in order to better their patients’ care. They also need to stay current for their specific specialties or subspecialties. Overall, your clinicians want to:
Knowing what you know at this point, how are you going to address these needs? Are you settling for whatever current ways you’re providing your CE programs? If you’re starting to have more questions than answers and find yourself wrangling for ideas to keep your clinicians happy, then it’s time to look for solid solutions.
If you’re already planning a CE event, you may already be aware of the costs involved, ranging from getting your course accredited to soliciting faculty participation to reserving hotel rooms. All of that adds up. Physicians have a decreased willingness to pay more for their own CE, as they have to take into account time lost for travel and being away from their practices, overall expenses, and cost of materials. So, is there a way to reduce both? Even minor costs for an event can be a turnoff for both you and your learners. Take, for example, these unexpected costs for basic items for you and/or your attendees:
The list goes on.
Do your learners really want this experience? Would it give them the CE satisfaction they need and want?
When you’re a CE director or coordinator, you need a way to find ways to simplify things when it comes to your learners.
EthosCE is a user-friendly learning management system (LMS) single platform that’s used by medical associations, academic medical centers, health centers, and medical information companies.
EthosCE gives you the automated tools you need so you can provide your learners with online content that improves their user experience, demonstrates measurable outcomes, and complies with ACCME guidelines.
“Sticky learning” might conjure up thoughts of countless brightly colored sticky notes stuck to desks, walls, windows, and even computer screens. But in this case, we’re looking at active learning. This is where your learners are engaging, applying, and reflecting on the knowledge gained. Their outcomes are better and their knowledge greater. They can also practice and that practice makes perfect.
What makes this possible? High-quality content that supplies interactivity and instant feedback.
As we’ve just seen, education research has shown that adult learners respond more positively to active, self-directed learning opportunities than to passive learning like the lectures and textbooks that everyone expects. Engagement is much higher when learners are asked to take responsibility, collaborate, or engage in their self-directed learning.
Can you turn your content away from walls of passive sticky notes and transform it into active learning experiences? Absolutely. According to the University of Colorado School of Medicine, one form of active learning is known as think-pair-share. As an example, this is where you would offer a CE course on types of recent viruses and present ways to recognize, diagnose, and treat the diseases involved. You would assign pairs of learners to research the topic and present their findings and treatment decisions. Think-pair-share is easily adaptable to online CE courses when you have message boards and assigned peer learning groups.
EthosCE uses discussion boards and email contact, so there’s an entire social learning environment available for your CE courses. In our think-pair-share example, these discussion boards can support your peer-learning activities.
This brings us to innovation and creativity—the home of Criterion 35.
ACCME Criterion 35 compliance, innovation, and learner engagement are significant challenges, even if you’ve been around the course development block a few million times. While ACCME doesn’t set forth many mandates that often, when it does, it makes a massive impact on you as a provider, albeit in a positive way. So, how will you meet these mandates?
The ACCME and AMA recently adopted the proposal to simplify and align their CME expectations for CME programs for the AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™.
When your goal is to keep your learners, offering this credit is a significant bonus because it shows the value of your program. It’s designed to foster innovation and flexibility in your accredited CE to meet the ACCME and AMA standards. Since this is simplified, you can establish and merge your new instructional practices and learning formats. With these under your belt, you’ll grow the number of members—and their ultimate satisfaction.
This brings us to Criterion 35. Just having a CE is one part of Criterion 35 innovation and creativity. You’ll have to introduce three other new forms of activities into your CE program during your accreditation term. These include:
From there, you must detail how your innovations supply the ability to meet CE initiatives.
Criterion 35 recognizes those CE programs that offer demonstrated innovation in their educational approach, the program and curriculum design, how assessments are used, and if they’ve engaged in technology use. When analyzing your educational strategies or methods to know if you qualify as innovative, you must supply an efficient means for your organization to fulfill its CE over time. You don’t want this to be a one-shot deal. Your CE program must also be able to adapt as your learner base expands and their needs become more complex.
The third mandate is learner engagement. When you’re planning for your programs, your medical professionals have several needs:
What’s of least value to your learners is having no interaction available in the material and having to download software.
It’s critical to have a clear understanding of the way that your medical professionals learn. A Lena VanNieuwenborg et al. study concluded several findings:
Where does your content sit in the grand scheme of things?
You’re probably wondering where you should go from here when it comes to helping with your ACCME mandates. EthosCE can help as your CE LMS technology platform. With its automated tools, you save time, and your learners receive the best possible experiences.
When you have EthosCE as your CE LMS technology platform, you can quickly adopt all the mandates and develop even better relationships with your learners and keep them with you.
An article in Advances in Medical Education and Practice showed that physicians participating in online courses is an emerging trend. Many programs are now available online at little or no cost to the participant. Self-directed CE has been shown to reduce the overall cost, mostly through bypassing live meetings.
This leads us to believe that there are certain issues for medical professionals who have to obtain their MOCs. Many of them are questioning the frequency, time involved, and costs surrounding regular assessments.
For example, the Texas Medical Association believes that they know why physicians are up in arms about recertifications. One of the things that they reported was the costs of testing materials and fees. Based on the JAMA 2017 report:
When your learners are working in their practices, that’s not an issue. The problems are the result of the fact their hospitals and health plans require the MOC for credentialing, admitting privileges, and contracts, something that they and their peers have to face. Simply put, medical professionals dislike the high-stakes MOC assessments that they have to take every ten years.
But there’s more. A recent Vision Initiative Study found that 34,118 physicians of the 36,392 people surveyed—or one in 12—actually found MOC of any value. The study went on to report that:
The study went even further:
What do your physicians want? Based on the writings of the New England Journal of Medicine, it’s CE. As it stands, physician medical licensure requires an annual minimum of twenty-five hours of CE, depending on the state. Your medical professionals accept this because it’s perceived as having value. In fact, the ACCME regulates MOC providers and requires that every CE provide course standards like an educational gap analysis, information about speaker conflict of interest, and course evaluations.
It’s easy to see the overall thought when it comes to obtaining MOCs. You can make the MOC process far easier with today’s modern technology that promotes greater content understanding and transfer of information.
With EthosCE, you receive curriculum development tools to transform your MOC program’s educational results. EthosCE’s LMS provides CE for the MOC for many of today’s medical boards, so earning their MOCs will be a positive experience for your medical professionals.
Every sport has its team players. In the case of IPCE, groups of clinicians meet to learn about one another’s healthcare roles, whether it’s doctors working with pharmacists or nurses working with respiratory therapists. When IPCE is successful, patients feel like they’re heard, treated with care, and experiencing the best possible outcomes.
In the center of IPCE is Criterion 23. Criterion 23 rewards IPCE for the minimum of at least two professions coming together for the planning and implementation. The ACCME rules for IPCE include all three of the following:
The Joint Accreditation™ for Interprofessional Continuing Education is offered through the ACCME and its original co-founders, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ACCC). These principals work in collaboration with several medical associations, including:
In order for your organization to become eligible, you’ll have to show that at least 25% of your CE is planned by and for two individual professions. The teams involved must have structure in place and be fully functional for more than eighteen months. Your organization also has to take part in the Joint Accreditation process. You’ll need to show compliance and/or be in good standing if you’re accredited through the ACCME or any other of the collaborating accreditors.
What are the benefits of receiving Joint Accreditation for IPCE?
The benefit of receiving your Joint Accreditation is that this provides a streamlined way for you to offer CE without having to obtain separate accreditations.
There are also a host of other benefits:
EthosCE lets you provide quality IPCE in accordance with the Joint Accreditation for Interprofessional Continuing Education criteria. It gives your organization an enterprise-grade technology through a single platform so you can easily meet Criterion 23 compliance and help your multiple healthcare professionals gain their IPCE credits without having to follow a separate accreditation for each profession.
When you’re planning your CE courses, you should use accessible, universal course design that’s user-friendly for your medical professionals. Your courses should include:
Universal course design is sometimes thought of as accommodation for different learning abilities, including vision- or hearing-impaired learners. Besides this, it can actually improve engagement and satisfaction among all learners. You might find that some students watch content repeatedly and use transcriptions. Others learn better from videos. For some adult learners, terms and concepts may need reinforcement and should be provided at the learner’s best pace.
Many doctors are now indicating their preferences for digital learning. Here are a few examples from the report from on24 and the MedData Group:
Are you ready for this rather amusing side note? The same physicians surveyed said this: 61.8% believe that a presenter with a non-nasally voice is a must-have for CME voice events!
With all this in mind, you can offer courses that can improve their satisfaction rates. Design your courses with accessibility and learner diversity in mind.
You also need the tools that make up good course designs and provide accessibility. Courses should be created for all audiences, so when you use a universal course design, this increases usability that in turn, makes your courses accessible for a wide range of learners.
What should you look for when designing a universal and accessible course design?
Taking these into consideration, EthosCE supports individually-paced and accessible learning in your medical CE courses on nearly every device, including iPhone, iPad, and Android. You can provide accessible content that reaches out and drives learner satisfaction.
Let’s go over what EthosCE can give you when it comes to improving your learners’ satisfaction.
EthosCE supports audio and video content sharing via webcasts and other media. When you combine these with discussion boards and email contact, you can develop a complete social learning environment for your CE courses. Discussion boards can support the aforementioned peer-learning activities. When you share your online content, you support enrollment growth and retention. Use a public part of your course to encourage enrollment and ongoing engagement with new and existing learners. EthosCE’s add-ons let you turn lectures into e-learning activities.
EthosCE enables you to give online quizzes and surveys and other materials to assess your learners at any time during a course. These include pre- and post-assessments. There’s a full range of tools to fully assess your learners:
As you’re developing your courses, you may wonder how often learners are accessing their courses, how consistent they are, and the depth of that engagement. EthosCE allows you to see how learners are being engaged on a per-course basis and across your enterprise. There are built-in reports that enable you to understand your course’s engagement, from demographics to completion rates.
Automate admin tasks to create courses that focus on learning experiences
When you’re busy doing other things—like admin tasks—you’re left with little time for course development. Learning experiences and satisfaction are key here.
EthosCE can automate administrative tasks. Automation helps you deal with those time-consuming admin functions like enrollment, reminders, course completion, and certificates. There’s an attendance tracker to automatically record attendance, prevent cheating, and import report records of external meetings. You can even clone courses with one click and drag-and-drop.
All this frees you to develop active learning strategies, improve learner engagement, and enhance your content with accessible and interesting materials.
There will be no more boring text-based materials when EthosCE enables you to create live courses for meetings or instructor-led training. You can also put all your learning online in an enduring format. EthosCE provides you with:
EthosCE lets you create a live course and take it on the road, whether it’s to the classroom or the conference center. You can take that same live course and track the offline learning in EthosCE. You’ll see the offline users in the same place as online users.
You can also perform several other functions:
Finally, once they’re done with a course, your learners can receive a customized and branded certificate indicating their course completion.
To keep learners coming back for more—and growing learner numbers is always a good thing—you can send out emails about new events and courses taking place and when a follow-up assessment is available.
When you need to accomplish your goals to provide great content for your medical professionals satisfaction, you need to add value. If not, those learners are out the door to another provider. When you choose the right LMS, you can create multiple courses, have control over your admin tasks, and streamline the entire compliance process.
Board, state, and government CE is mandatory for medical professionals. EthosCE’s easy-to-use enterprise-grade LMS supplies the tools you need to provide great courses and demonstrates why CE is essential, so you can offer quality experiences for your learners’ satisfaction. Take your CE courses to the next level. Engaged learners are satisfied learners.
EthosCE believes CME technology solutions should be designed to improve healthcare professionals’ user experience, comply with ACCME guidelines, reduce administrative costs, and demonstrate measurable outcomes.
Improve your medical professionals’ CE satisfaction. Schedule a 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today!
