4 Tips to Retain Medical CE Learners with the Right LMS

Healthcare professionals are trained and certified to deliver high-quality care to their patients. But they also face heavy regulations that require ongoing training to comply with federal and state regulations, as well as provider certifications and recertifications in their particular specialties. Your medical CE learners need to stay current with the latest developments and knowledge.

As a CE director, you need to offer them continuing education (CE), but this can be a challenge. You have to provide relevant educational courses in order to retain them in your facility or association. They’re busy people, of course, so their lifelong learning has to seamlessly fit into their schedules.

Here are tips to help you retain your medical CE learners using the right Learning Management System (LMS).

Tip 1: Develop CE Courses That Engage and Inspire Learners and Increase Knowledge Retention

Developing courses for CE learners is always a challenge. Content should fill a specific gap in competence or knowledge. Healthcare professionals are more likely to complete their CE if your content is engaging, convenient, user friendly, and enjoyable. When you create e-learning deliverables, your CE learners need to see the relevancy of what they’re learning.

Compared to the average medical student, your CE learners have accumulated more life experiences and have more extensive knowledge bases. As you’re developing courses, take those experiences and educational backgrounds into account and present content with experiential learning in mind.

Break up your content into digestible, bite-sized amounts. It’s easy for learners to become overwhelmed if your content contains large blocks of content. Use bulleted points and numbered lists, and consider developing content that contains smaller modules. The main cause of learners’ poor knowledge retention is having too much material to absorb.

As you develop your CE courses, consider this: it’s your responsibility to provide content that fills specific gaps in your medical CE learners’ knowledge or competence. When you have automated fully-featured LMS tools, you can help your clinicians reach their full potential.

Tip 2: Offer Much More Than Textbooks and PDFs

It’s easy to offer old-school content like textbooks and PDFs and call these your CE courses. That said, you’ll be wondering why your CE learners constantly march off to other competitors for their education. Why use the old when you can embrace the new, as well as accommodate diverse learning styles?

To retain medical CE learners, your courses should have options for reading text and/or listening to audio. When designing courses for the visual learner, graphics, video, and animation are ideal.

Let’s see what you can offer.

Social media

Social media can be a great place to learn—and “argue”—about learners’ most trending topics. According to an article in the NEJM, social media users can easily start conversations about courses, have practical or interesting questions to discuss the content or other relevant topics, and share links to articles and research papers.

Full multimedia

Another thing to consider is giving online quizzes and surveys to assess your CE learners at any time during your courses, including pre- and post-test assessments. When you have the right LMS tools available, you can take advantage of:

• Multiple-choice, true-or-false, essay, and other common question types
• Feedback to your learners during their assessments that are specific to a question or their specific response
• Multimedia questions and embedded videos
• Follow-up assessments, like those at 30 days

Gamification

We’re competitive by nature and eLearning is no different. Game-based learning is known to improve knowledge recall and retention because it’s engaging and fun. It sparks collaboration on group projects and motivation, whether it’s collecting badges or certificates or doing other enjoyable activities that communicate information.

Webinars

Having to attend onsite conferences can be a negative for many medical professionals. However, remote, live, virtual seminars or online conferences are most suitable when it comes to joining your CE learners and their instructors or guest speakers together.

When you engage an LMS platform, you can create webinars, enroll learners, and evaluate the amount of time that your learners spend in the webinars as a requirement for their course completion.

Tip 3: Create and Develop Any Credit Types, Including Credit Hours

When you want to retain CE learners, be sure to offer multiple credit types and hours. Learners use different credit types and related numbers of hours to improve their skills and stay current with any technologies, regulations, and laws that apply to their individual fields as part of their ongoing professional development.

With the right LMS, you can create your own credit types, like CEUs, CNE, CPE, CLE, CFP, CEH, and PDH, as well as specialty credits, and then apply these to one or more courses or groups of courses. You’ll also be able to set the number of credits to each course or the entire curriculum.

Tip 4: Provide ACCME Accreditation and Compliance Courses

ACCME learners are always concerned about their required ACCME accreditation and compliance requirements, particularly since they need to maintain their board certification or licensing through taking CE. Provide them with the necessary courses that meet these mandates involving innovation, Criterion 35, and learner engagement.

To keep CE learners with you, your goal is to increase the value of your course for these medical professionals. The recent ACCME and AMA recently adopted the proposal to simplify and align CME expectations for CE programs for the AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. This enables you to introduce and combine new ways to develop courses and specific learning formats.

When you provide CE for Criterion 35, you’re supplying your learners with courses that add innovation by introducing new formats, like M&M conferences, and internet-enduring materials, such as webinars, podcasts, and video.

When it comes to learner engagement, your medical CE learners want to receive the highest-quality content, online accessibility, and ease of use. What’s important to them? They are results oriented and self-directed, learn best with real-life situations, and demonstrate high motivation when they can obtain new information that solves problems in work or life.

Get LMS Technology You Love: Retain Your Medical Learners with EthosCE Enterprise-Grade LMS

EthosCE is a Learning Management System (LMS) designed specifically for medical learners.

EthosCE provides you with an enterprise-grade LMS technology platform that allows you to customize content and add features such as video, animation, and live webinar streaming. We’ve already helped many associations and universities make the switch to our easy-to-use LMS.

What are the educational benefits you receive from EthosCE? Your CE learners will:

• Review the latest research.
• Remain current in their areas of expertise.
• Stay current with the latest developments in their specialty or subspecialty.
• Increase professional growth.
• Refine their skills to improve their patients’ care for improved outcomes.
• Earn membership in professional bodies.
• Learn team-building skills.

As a CE director, you can use the EthosCE platform and its tools for curriculum development. You can provide your learners with online content that enhances their learning and complies with ACCME guidelines, helps retain their knowledge, and inspires them to continue their learning with you.

Get the Automated Tools You Need

CE is mandatory for medical learners, and you need to retain those professionals with the right LMS. EthosCE gives you the tools you need to offer quality courses and illustrates why CE is important.

Want to learn more about how EthosCE can be the right LMS to retain your medical learners? Feel free to request a 1-on-1 walkthrough with one of our medical CE experts today!