Maximize Your CME Program with These 11 Features and Services

Is your current CME software selling you short? As a busy CE director, when you deal with an ever-changing regulatory atmosphere with equally fluctuating compliance requirements, you can’t afford to use a technology solution that falls short of what you need. Likewise, if you experience challenges within your CPD office by way of limited internal resources or have gaps in skill sets, this can divide your time, taking you away from critical content design and development.

There is a feature-rich, automated LMS available for your CME program, as well as a professional service that can help when your CPD office is short staffed or when you need to fill that specific need or skill gap.

This article will tell you about ten features and a service that you can use when you want to maximize your CME program.

How to Find the LMS Features You Need and What They Are

What LMS features are vital for your CME program? If your current system isn’t doing what it should, you may want to look for an enterprise-grade platform that has a wide range of features. Let’s take a look at the ones you should consider.

1. Ease of use

Your LMS should be easy to use, with a clean administrative interface. It should enable you to clone your courses with a single click and to drag and drop to reorder course components. A course creation wizard will make it easy for the occasional user.

EthosCE has a flexible, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface that enables your instructors to quickly embed rich media and change course content. You can also embed ebooks, links to course texts, videos, audio material, and assessments.

If your current LMS is non-intuitive, this can pose significant challenges for your instructors. What’s more, if your learners can’t navigate through their courses, their engagement will suffer. The last thing you want is to have them go to another provider.

2. Automation

When you look for an enterprise-grade LMS, like EthosCE, you want to be able to remove the repetitive tasks that can fill your day if you don’t have dedicated staff on board. With automation, you can streamline tasks like scheduling, doing enrollment, course tracking, managing emails and user registrations, and performing payment processing, all through one administrative panel. With your newfound free time, you can focus on your CME program, learners, and instructors.

3. Tracking capabilities

A proper LMS gives you tracking capabilities that tell you what courses learners have taken and which have been the most effective—and which haven’t. Tracking enables you to examine your learners’ attendance, progress, and completions and what they did both online and offline. It will allow your CPD office to keep track of credit types offered and the certificates provided when courses are completed. EthosCE enables you to identify learning patterns at every stage of your CME program. You can also analyze:

• Your program to assess its overall performance
• Individual courses to assess specific program performance
• Individual learner performance

4. Workflow improvement

The last thing that your learners need is confusion over where they should go next as they advance through their course content. EthosCE provides a simple, linear workflow that means learners will never get lost as they move through your courses.

5. Support for multiple credit types

An LMS should provide support for the creation and delivery of content and for a wide range of credit types. These include continuing education credit for regularly scheduled series, like grand rounds and case conferences, MOCs, simulations, web-based activities, and a wide variety of other educational formats, like CEUs, CNEs, CPEs, CLEs, CFPs, CEHs, PDHs, and any other credit types and specialty credits. EthosCE does just this.

6. Unlimited certificate templates

One standard certificate type is not enough. An LMS should offer unlimited certificate templates, so you can decide which ones are most appropriate for your individual courses.

7. Automated, customizable certificates

EthosCE enables you to create custom certificate designs and as many as you need. You can:

• Use tokens to fill in the learner’s name, address, course title, credits, date, and more.
• Embed images for seals and signatures.
• Design your certificate in a simple rich text editor, or use full HTML mode.
• Display the number and type of CME, CE, CNE, and other CEU credits.
• Allow your learners to reprint certificates at any time to reduce back-office work.

8. Assessment tools

Look for an LMS that supplies you with ways to create follow-up assessments that automatically notify your learners based on set intervals, like every thirty days.

With EthosCE, you can give online quizzes and surveys to assess learners at any time during their courses, including pre- and post-test assessments. You can use the assessment tools to:

• Give multiple-choice, true-or-false, essay, and other common questions.
• Provide feedback to learners during the assessment, specific to a question, or globally.
• Create multimedia questions and embed videos.

9. PARS-compliant reports and integration with ACCME web services

You can deliver compliant courses through a robust LMS that supports PARS-compliant reports and integrates with ACCME web services, including ABA, ABIM, and ABP MOC2 programs, with automated reporting to boards and other external systems, including ACCME PARS, CE Broker, CPE Monitor, and others. EthosCE accomplishes these tasks smoothly and efficiently.

10. Reporting tools

As a CE director, you know the importance of reliable reports and analytics in your courses. EthosCE makes it easy to see how your learners are being engaged on a per-course basis with robust built-in reports and data analytics. You can then understand every course’s user engagement, from their participation to their completion rates. Use these reporting tools to:

• Measure detailed evidence of learner engagement by course or globally.
• Drill into reports for an in-depth understanding of learner behaviors.
• Download reports immediately or create schedules for email delivery.
• Build and share custom reports.

Your CPD Office Is Short Staffed or Has a Skill Gap: There’s a Service That Can Help

Finally, there is a service that can help when you have limited internal resources and/or skill gaps that you need to fill.

11. A professional, skills-driven concierge service

As a CME program director, your job is to create and deliver courses that meet today’s compliance requirements. When you have limited resources due to staff turnovers or gaps in skill sets, you’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

EthosCE has a professional, skills-driven concierge service that can address your challenging needs. It can help you get your continuing education content online as quickly as possible, letting you spend more time on innovation.

This professional service can also help you resolve short-term issues resulting from your staff turnover problems, increasing the number of activities that your CPD office can do. It can do things more quickly and efficiently—and cheaply—than using students or temps, once the efficiencies, speed, and quality are factored in. It costs less than a full-time employee, and it can also be done remotely or on a retainer-type basis.

EthosCE’s concierge service brings in experienced LMS administrators who are highly skilled and can perform tasks quickly and implement best practices for improved user experiences.

While it gives you access to expert CPD technical resources for offloading menial tasks, it doesn’t have to be used for only one task and not others. Since the service is flexible, you can use it any time that you have gaps in skills and in any combination of ways. You can use it for:

• Setting up courses
• Creating and sending reports
• Pulling data
• Creating, reviewing, and updating forms
• Emailing learners
• Providing end-user support
• Performing data entry
• Recording documentation
• Doing supplemental training

EthosCE also provides experienced project managers and dedicated data-entry staff to make sure your course production stays on track, so you can focus on developing critical CME content. These project managers supply a template for data collection of the following:

• Learning objectives
• Faculty bios and disclosures
• Pre- and post- assessment questions with an answer key
• Program evaluation
• Release and expiration dates
• Types and number of credits offered
• Commercial support statements and other relevant information
• Certificates for whenever you are awarding credits

Ultimately, this concierge service from EthosCE enables you to:

• Earn more revenue from your existing course content and realize the benefits of earlier learner participation in courses.
• Spend more time on innovation.
• Take advantage of best practices in course delivery so your learners receive the best value from your courses.
• Save money from flat-fee course pricing, so there are no hidden fees or surprises.

Put the Two Together: Pair Your LMS with an Expert Concierge Service

Maximizing your CME program doesn’t have to be difficult. EthosCE LMS provides you with the features you need to successfully get your online courses up and running. Our full-service concierge service helps you tackle the challenges of your CPD office when limited resources exist or if you need to improve on skill gaps. When you put the two together, you have a winning combination that saves you time and money and lets you get on with what you do best: creating cutting-edge CME content for your learners.

Maximize your CME program with robust LMS features and a concierge service when you’re short staffed. Request a 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today!