EthosCE and the National Cancer Comprehensive Network

The National Cancer Comprehensive Network (NCCN), is a not-for-profit alliance of 21 of the world’s leading cancer centers including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Duke Cancer Institute, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Through high quality programs, NCCN offers access to expert physicians, superior treatment, and quality and safety initiatives. The primary goal of all NCCN initiatives is to improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of oncology practice so patients can live better lives. The deployment of EthosCE Learning Management System will automate and streamline multiple aspects for NCCN’s CME enterprise to further advance effective cancer care.

Features

• EthosCE Learning Management System (LMS).
• Single Sign On (SSO) authentication with the Association Management System.
• Integration with Cvent, the largest event management software company in the US.
• Rich interactive reports for pre- and post-test comparison.
• Follow up post-tests and performance comparison for outcomes measurement.
• Global course reports dashboard for tracking course and credit completions.
• Downloadable post-test and evaluation reports to “slice and dice” data based on User profile.
• Fully customizable, automated reminder emails based on course registrations and completions.
• Themed the LMS site to match the look and feel of NCCN.org, a site that had more than 1.1 million unique visitors in 2010.
• ACCME PARS Support.
• Full day on-site training for technical and education staff.

Challenges

NCCN offers accredited educational activities which positively impact patients that need oncology care. Common CME activities include live conferences and symposia, live webinars, on-demand webcasts, and The Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (JNCCN). Some of the key objectives of these programs include objectively measuring the performance improvement on patient outcomes. The other important success criteria for this implementation from various departments at NCCN were as follows:

• Operations: Streamline the user workflow and attendance tracking for live meetings, conferences which are very popular educational events at NCCN. The NCCN 16th Annual National Conference was attended by more than 1700 oncologists, nurses and other healthcare professionals.

• CME: Measure outcomes of learners by setting up follow up post-tests triggered on specific criteria.

• Reporting and Measurement: Visually compelling reports to compare learners’ performance in quizzes for quicker analysis and decision making.

• Finance: Set up reminder e-mails to enhance learner participation in activities. This feature was very important to ensure greater learner participation so as to realize the best ROI on activity set up costs.

• Marketing: Match the look-and-feel of NCCN.org to create a consistent user experience.

Solution:

EthosCE successfully delivered this highly time sensitive project within budget with careful planning and proven project management methodologies. Integration with Cvent, was a high risk item only because it involved working with third party APIs. As a part of the risk mitigation strategies, this was the first project milestone to be accomplished. EthosCE has a modular and scalable architecture and so implementing follow up post-tests and reports for quiz comparison was the next and an easy milestone to hit. For the reminder email feature, DLC Solutions proactively architected a solution which was highly configurable and enabled administrators to send emails on various criteria. The user interface for this feature was designed after extensive planning with business analysis, product management, development and user experience teams . The Single Sign On integration with the main NCCN E-commerce site and overall theming of the education site were less complex items to implement with little surprises. EthosCE is proud to be associated with this implementation for a prestigious group like NCCN and is looking forward to the site launch in the near future.