What the ACCME Is Saying about Tailoring Your CME Experience

The Accrediting Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) encourages CME program innovation in conjunction with several accreditation bodies, like the AMA. The ACCME accredits CME providers that support, inspire, and motivate educators to achieve their full potential. They set the specific standards for CME that accelerate learning, change, and growth in healthcare. Their standards reflect the values of the educator community and respond to the evolving healthcare environment. As a result, clinicians and teams can drive improvement in their practice and optimize care for their patients.

Every day, the CME team works to make a difference for clinicians, teams, and patients. They use real-world practices to help build a community of practice that enables CME providers to learn from each other, continually improve their education, and demonstrate how accredited CME measurably improves healthcare. As always, the emphasis is on demonstrable end result improvement for learners and patients.

In this post, you’ll learn how the ACCME views CME program customization and how to remain in compliance as you tailor your CME experience, discover how to take stock of your CME resources, and learn how to choose a tech partner to enable an intuitive program development for your members.

How the ACCME Views CME Program Customization

The ACCME looks for value-focused innovations that provide measurable benefits to your learners and support the stated CME mission.

As a CE director, it’s important to learn how to match your CE technology with specific learner outcomes. You should receive results that are easily measured and tracked. The technology you use must be robust and adaptable based on learner demand and content diversity.

Take This Quiz: Find Out How Much Control You Have Over Your CME Experience

Can you answer these questions about your CME experience?

• Does your CME experience offer content customization, data management and sharing, and administrative automation?
  • These are three critical components of an agile CME platform that allows for relevant customization when it comes to your learners.
• Can I adjust the intensity of my learners’ curriculum content easily when new data insights suggest that the subject matter should be taught at a more relaxed pace?
  • If you’re unable to do so, consider an LMS where you can add or remove content with only a few clicks. You should have the ability to use analytics to discover if your learners could benefit from another approach to their learning. In other words, you should look for an LMS that offers easily customizable content.
• Is it simple to add components like video, animation, or live streams to challenging material that requires immersive learning?
  • Look for an LMS that offers the freedom to innovate at will. Your learners’ needs change, and you should respond efficiently and effortlessly. Insist that your new or upgraded LMS provides features that enhance content with engaging educational tools that work seamlessly with your existing AMS platform or tools.
• Am I able to easily review and slice learner assessment insights on-demand and share them with my team in minutes?
  • When it comes to innovation, data management quality assurance may be the last thing on your mind. However, it serves as the fuel to ignite innovation and data-driven insights, enabling you to create the best educational ideas that provide lasting value for your learners.
• Can I limit administrative duties that lead to productivity drain by delegating repetitive tasks to digital automation?
  • When you’re looking to an enterprise-level LMS, these repetitive areas are at the top of the list for streamlining tasks like automatic scheduling and managing duties like emails, user registrations, payment processing, and staff alerts through a single admin panel. You and your team can then focus on critical content innovation and customer service.
• Is ACCME and AMA compliance management a burden or a headache-free automated process?
  • When reviewing your compliance with AMA and ACCME innovation standards, it’s essential to have a system in place that supports ongoing compliance as a continuous process.

Think about it: if you don’t have control over your CME experience, innovation is a challenge. You must also follow the ACCME’s guidelines on innovation.

In their 2018 press release, ACCME and JAMA confirmed their joint intention to promote innovation as a regular component of all CME programming. These would comprise enduring aspects of CME administrative and content management and development. While the ACCME and JAMA would focus on promoting innovative educational strategy and offering compliance guidance, CME providers would form the groundwork for creating forward-thinking educational materials.

Any CME provider wishing to initiate innovation must begin with quality assurance on a procedural level.

Criterion 35

As a CME provider, you must demonstrate creativity and innovation in the development of your CME program. Every component should be built with scalability in order to recognize the changing needs of diverse groups of learners who present with various professional competency levels and interests.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to merge your CME operations into an enterprise-grade LMS. This provides you with administrative backlog reductions that cause a negative chain effect in productivity.

The ACCMR further states that Criterion 35 may include but is not limited to innovation in:

• Educational approach
• Design
• Assessment
• Use of technology

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Educational Approach: Make Systemic Innovation Easy

Don’t limit your content curriculum updates to single courses or activities. Go for a top-down strategy to design activities the way you want. Include learning experiences like webinars, videos, and podcasts that are easily accessible to editors. If you use an agile LMS, you can respond to every learners’ specific needs that enable you to quickly and easily make curriculum changes.

Assessment: Accelerate Knowledge Retention

When it comes down to having accurate PARS-relevant data, using a robust LMS provides customizable, instant learner feedback. The data shows demonstrable improvement with an intuitive learner assessment system. The LMS supplies data on individual assessments, per questions, or per activity milestones. This enables key concept reinforcement and promotes knowledge retention in every activity.

Use of Technology: Own a Tech Stack That Fuels Productivity

The right LMS relieves the many administrative tasks that burden your team’s productivity away from your program’s primary goal: providing excellent educational experiences for your learners.

As a CME provider, do you know what innovation will look like in your organization? Look at administrative design, your content delivery, and data optimization. When viewing these, use them to transform your overall plans for your CME to transform your learners’ educational successes.

What to do next? Choose a tech partner that can offer the right tools to instantly tailor your CME experience to your organization’s needs.

What to Look For in a Tech Partner

When it comes to looking for an ACCME innovation solution that gives you the tools you need, look for time-saving administrative automation, complete data management control, and trouble-free curriculum customization. EthosCE provides those needs-focused customization capabilities with outstanding support to ensure that innovation is a seamless process.

EthosCE is the industry-leading, SCORM-compliant learning management system designed to automate and modernize the delivery of continuing education in the health professions. We work closely with leading medical associations, academic centers, and health systems to optimize their technology infrastructure and create an easy-to-use and intuitive environment for learners and CME administrators alike.

To learn more about your EthosCE CME experience and its tailoring to ACCME requirements, contact us for 1-on-1 demonstration!