The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) requires Continuing Medical Education (CME) providers to utilize non-education, or non-CME, strategies “to enhance change as an adjunct to its activities/educational interventions.” Global Education Group has produced a brief video, available on You Tube, for accredited CME providers that hones in on three concrete non-CME strategies to enhance CME programming and thus fulfill ACCME’s Criterion 17.
Background on Non-Education Strategies
When reporting about ACCME news, we recently noted that ACCME added new examples of compliance with the criteria for achieving Accreditation with Commendation, including Criterion 17. Regarding non-education strategies, ACCME notes:
The ACCME is looking for evidence of the use of strategies such as, but not limited to, rewards, process redesign, peer review, audit feedback, monitoring, reminders as tools to enhance, or facilitate, change. Some providers are concerned that some of these may be considered ‘educational’ as they potentially change what people ‘know’ or because they inform learners (e.g., “It may be time for you to call back your patients with…”). In C17, the ACCME is looking for tactics that go beyond the educational activity or intervention. Essentially, the ACCME is looking for providers to broaden the range of tools they use to facilitate change.
Specific non-education strategy examples offered by ACCME include participant reminders following CME events, working with others to facilitate a peer to peer feedback system to reinforce new practices, or incorporating questions about practices incorporated from a CME event into patient satisfaction questionnaires. The Massachusetts Medical Society offers additional suggestions, including pocket guidelines for physicians, information posted on a website, screening tools, and pedometers or other giveaways to support the CME activity.
In an ACCME video addressing ways providers use non-educational strategies to creatively support CME activities, the speaker stresses “the literature shows that reminders as an adjunct to learning, changes and maintains the change in practice.” That is the overall goal of quality CME.
Global Education Group’s Adjunct Strategies for CME Success
Global Education Group’s video targets three non-education strategies to benefit both CME participants and patients:
•Resource Center: A resource center is a place, usually on the web, where physicians and patients can go to find information on standards, FAQ’s, and other issues that demonstrate best practices. These types of resource centers are great where therapeutic standards or therapies are emerging, or where hands-on practices require improvement.
•Patient reminders or “Did You Know” sheets: A patient reminder, or “Did You Know” sheet, is simply a sheet (paper or electronic) and usually includes a link to a patient advocacy organization within the sheet. These are great for disease or treatment areas where early diagnosis or patient adherence/compliance is a critical issue.
•Patient Surveys: Global has worked closely with one of our partners, Clinical and Patient Educators Association, to do quite a few different patient surveys in several different therapeutic areas. These surveys are incredibly useful because they empower the patient to drive future education. For example, for one patient survey we did, we asked patients with MS how many times their medication had been changed. 21% stated that it had been changed more than 4 times since initial diagnosis. As another example in the area of diabetes, we found out that only about half of the diabetes patients we surveyed stated that they were taking their medication directly as prescribed. As well, most of these respondents stated they were not communicating this information with their physician or specialist, which is obviously a problem.