Managing continuing medical education (CME) is crucial in the medical industry. It’s not only important for physicians to earn enough CME credits to renew their licenses, but also to keep professionals advancing their skills as new treatment methods, research, and technology develop.
Organizations that provide CME courses and activities are important in that process, but it’s common to wonder how to create an effective CME program, what the accreditation requirements are, or how to manage all the details involved successfully.
We’ve created this guide to help you get started and offer insights on tools that can help.
What Makes a Successful CME Program for Medical Professionals?
Qualities you should make sure your organization’s CME program includes are:
- Accreditation and credit reporting: Successful CME programs should meet accreditation requirements from organizations like the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME). It’s also helpful if you use a learning management system (LMS) that can automatically report CME credits earned to the ACCME or other major credit tracking systems.
- Evidence-based and relevant information: Medical education courses should teach information and treatment strategies that are relevant to the industry today. They should also use evidence-based treatment strategies with thorough clinical research supporting them.
- Accessibility: Health professionals like physicians and nurse practitioners manage busy schedules. That can make it difficult to find time to learn. Ideally, CME content should be accessible to make continuing education easier to manage. Online courses through an accessible LMS help make that possible.
- Varied formats or hybrid approaches: Everyone learns differently, and it can start to get boring learning from the exact same format over and over. Therefore, delivering content in different formats like videos, audio, text-based, and interactive activities helps keep learners engaged. Hybrid approaches, where you add options for in-person learning, events, and activities, can also help.
- Evaluations: CME courses should regularly assess learners’ knowledge. It helps to ensure course activities are successful while showing learners that they’re actively making progress that will help them deliver better patient care and treatment outcomes.
How Do You Get Accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education?
Since accreditation with major organizations like the ACCME is crucial for a successful CME program, you’ll need to know how to actually complete the accreditation process. The ACCME provides a detailed set of steps you need to take. This includes:
- Pre-application review: Complete a pre-application review in which the ACCME will determine whether your organization is eligible for accreditation.
- Confirmation of intent: Submit a confirmation of intent form with the accreditation fee to confirm that you want to move forward in the accreditation process.
- Self-study report: The ACCME will ask you to submit a report telling the story of your CME program. That’ll include explaining your mission, descriptions of your courses or activities, documentation, and examples or demonstrations of practices described and how they help improve medical knowledge or patient-centered care.
- Performance in practice review: You’ll submit two CME activities completed in the last 24 months for review. That will involve entering the data into the ACCME’s Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS) and submitting evidence of performance in practice for both of the activities you choose.
- Accreditation interview: After completing the steps above, your organization will be given the opportunity to speak with a team of volunteer surveyors from the CME community who will help evaluate your qualifications further.
The ACCME states that completing all of these steps takes about 6-10 months in total. So, it is an extended process to become accredited, but that’s also why accredited CME providers hold so much weight and offer a lot of value in the medical industry.
How to Create CME Content That Addresses Practice Gaps?
One of the reasons why CME is so important in the medical industry is because it can help fill in practice gaps, where knowledge or skill can be increased, or additional practice in treatment methods can help maintain competency. This is especially important as new treatment methods develop, more research becomes available, and technology advances in the industry.
A great place to start is to perform a detailed gap analysis. Oftentimes, that begins by evaluating what’s currently happening and relevant in the industry today.
For example, you might uncover growing concerns about prescribing practices for opioids and/or new research that identifies prescribing practices that can help reduce opioid-related prescription risks. Then, your organization can use that information to develop an effective and up-to-date CME activity or course that can help physicians improve their knowledge and skills.
How Can Technology Support Continuous Learning and Patient Care?
Technology can play a big role in supporting the goal of lifelong learning in the medical industry. Online CME courses and activities make learning materials more accessible to professionals who don’t always have a lot of time on their hands to attend in-person training sessions.
Online learning helps make CME self-paced and easy to follow throughout the process. Then, professionals can feel empowered to take what they’ve learned and apply it in practice to improve patient care and outcomes.
Why Do Healthcare Organizations Need Learning Management Systems?
Learning management systems play a big role in the process of making continuing education options more accessible. An LMS makes it easier for organizations to create effective online learning materials, deliver them in an accessible way, form an organized system, assess results, and automatically report CME credits to organizations like the ACCME.
When you’re looking for LMS options, it’s best to look for software that’s designed specifically for healthcare continuing education. Our EthosCE LMS at Cadmium is a great option that can help. It’s designed to assist with compliance, automatically report CME credits to major accrediting organizations and credit tracking systems, and deliver content in many different formats to help professionals retain the information.
What Are Best Practices for Delivering High Quality Educational Content?
Some best practices to follow while you’re creating and delivering CME content include:
- Offer clear learning objectives so professionals know what they’ll gain from courses and activities
- Have an organized and personalized system, such as a searchable course library or personalized recommendations for professionals
- Include interactive elements to keep professional learners engaged and help them retain crucial information
- Provide options for social sharing and peer discussions for a well-rounded feel
- Deliver content in varied formats to help with engagement and different learning styles
- Give actionable feedback to learners to help them understand how to improve
- Regularly assess knowledge to track progress and the success of activities
How EthosCE from Cadmium Can Help
Cadmium’s award-winning LMS for healthcare professionals is designed to help with healthcare continuing education, including the distinct requirements of CME. Some top features of EthosCE include:
- Automatic credit reporting to the ACCME, JA PARS, CE Broker, and CPE Monitor
- An organized system for tracking analytics and learner progress
- Features that assist with compliance requirements in the medical industry
- An automatic notification system to help learners meet CME credit deadlines and stay on track with courses
- The ability to create a scalable and searchable course library
- An easy-to-navigate system that makes learning feel more accessible
- Easy options to edit and update courses as needed
- And more
Click here to learn more about how EthosCE can help your organization create a successful CME program.
