3 Reasons Why CME Leaders Need a Flexible LMS with ACCME Integration

It’s a fact: even the best project management suite on the market can’t make up for an efficient LMS. In this post, we’ll show you three reasons why you don’t have to compromise on administrative features to get the flexible LMS experience that you want for your learners right now.

Is it Time for a New Solution?

First, let’s get real about your LMS. It’s a digital platform that’s meant to make your work life easier, not more confusing. If your LMS is adding to your workload or making tedious tasks more complex, then it’s time to look for a new solution—one that actually solves workflow issues for you rather than simply bringing them to the cloud.

It Gets Worse (But it Doesn’t Have to)

There’s more. When you can’t customize your LMS to present activities the way you want or slice your data to get the insights you need on-demand, then the quality of your educational programming may suffer. Without the granular insights that complete data can provide, and with rigid curriculum design, it may be a struggle to transform your content from basic to brilliant within the strict boundaries of your LMS platform’s capabilities.

Because using an LMS with limited features means slower program growth and inconsistent user experience for your learners, you may also find yourself struggling to compensate for the data management work that your LMS just can’t handle, like bulk registration processing, analytics collection, and data report design. If you’re also tasked with formatting and collecting data for ACCME submissions, you’re in for a lot of tedious, stressful (and unnecessary) grunt work.

Why Your LMS (Not You or Your Administrative Assistant) Should Manage Your Critical Data

As a CME director, what you really need is a flexible LMS that helps you get the most out of your data, while preserving human resources for tasks that require, well, humans—like customer service and curriculum development. Your program data is a goldmine of insight, but the job of actually mining, sorting, and collecting that data is one that requires the attention of a highly-skilled team and virtually error-proof execution. That’s because your data really has to be accurate, and not just because it’s how you generate the analytics that drive your growth strategy (if you are not using an analytics platform, learn how easy it is here). It’s also a matter of ACCME compliance. You don’t want numerical mistakes in your report submissions—a few numbers on the wrong line on a spreadsheet can invalidate your entire Self Study narrative—causing you to search for alternative methods to demonstrate results.

Data management is one of those tasks that is best left to a powerful cloud-based system with nothing else to do, unlike you and your team.

Reason 1: You need an agile, secure, digital system to manage your CME program and organizational data. The potential for human error in data collection and the amount of time required to manually collect and verify the data required for ACCME accreditation or reaccreditation can easily drain your entire team’s productivity levels, taking time away from critical policy development.

Solution: An enterprise-grade LMS will handle data management for you, drawing data directly from the LMS and allowing you access to the powerful insights needed to build effective strategy.

Not My Department (or Yours): How to Delegate Repetitive Tasks That Limit Productivity

CME management is “paperwork” heavy (even if most of it involves no paper at all). From certificate emails to registrations, your team may be silently cursing your successful marketing team as new learners flow in.

It isn’t their fault. The pace at which online learning is conducted today demands the administrative processing speed of a machine, and jumping from platform to platform to manage data will slow down even the fastest admin.

Tasks such as order processing, helpdesk management, emailing reminders, and transcript processing can keep your team too busy for other program development duties that require human expertise. That isn’t a human resources issue that you can afford to ignore: unlike tasks that can be automated, curriculum development and strategy-building can’t be delegated to a computer system. Your learners and your strategy development process may suffer as a result of an overtaxed team.

Reason 2: The easiest way to preserve your team’s availability for critical tasks is to automate administrative duties whenever possible. Think it can’t be done? Use an enterprise-grade LMS to automate:

• Welcome and onboarding emails
• Bulk learner transcript processing
• New registrations
• Data collection
• Reminder emails
• Payment processing
• Support ticket responses
• And more

Solution: Choosing a robust, flexible LMS built to scale will make it simple to automate time-intensive repetitive tasks that will mount in complexity and number as your program grows.

The End of Paperwork (Really): Choose an LMS That Automates ACCME Accreditation Records Management

Even if your team tolerates your messy desk and inconsistent time management skills, data submissions to the ACCME are not a format where personal quirks can be tolerated. Your program data should be flawless and your PARS-compliant report submissions pristine. But you know this. The simplest way to stop worrying about PARS is to stop doing it altogether.

Don’t drop the coffee. What we mean is that you can use a CME management platform that automates PARS-compliant submissions for you, drawing data directly from the LMS and making the entire process a matter of clicks (not weeks).

Reason 3: Accuracy and comprehensiveness are vital when collecting and managing data for your ACCME Accreditation application. A flexible LMS with ACCME integration removes the last mile between you and ACCME compliance, empowering you to focus on content and management, not documentation during the Self Study process.

Solution: Choose a robust CME data management and LMS platform like EthosCE, which automates data collection and application submission.

You Don’t Have to Compromise

EthosCE offers ongoing support as your program expands, along with a range of development services (such as web design and curriculum development) that can meet the needs of your organization regardless of how much or how quickly it grows. We provide ACCME integration as a part of our flexible LMS, making the application process easier than ever for organizations of any size.

EthosCE believes CME technology solutions should be designed to improve healthcare professionals’ user experience, comply with ACCME guidelines, reduce administrative costs, and demonstrate measurable outcomes.

To learn how EthosCE can enhance the continuing education of your medical professionals, request a free 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today