Why Continuing Education Is Important to Leading in Healthcare

Becoming a physician, nurse, or other healthcare professional requires many years of education. But the learning doesn’t stop there. After earning their board certification or licensing, professionals need to sustain their certification or licensing through continuing education (CE).

As a CE director, you know why continuing education is important to leading in healthcare. Fortunately, there is a technology platform that enables you to get the most out of it.

Educational Benefits from the Learner Perspective

Beyond re-certifications and licensing, CE plays a crucial role throughout the careers of healthcare professionals, as their patients will receive improved health care and subsequently, better outcomes. CE enables learners to:

• Stay up to date in their relevant areas of practice.
• Review the latest research.
• Remain current with the latest developments in their specialty or subspecialty.
• Refine their skills to improve patient care.
• Address the real-world challenges they face daily.
• Increase professional growth.
• Learn team management skills.
• Earn membership in their professional organizations.

In recent years, CE has demonstrated its ability to help learners realize advancements in various medical specialties. For example, in 2000, there were multiple fatalities from coronary heart disease. These have since been reduced by nearly 40%. Because of CE, patient outcomes have been improved with new technologies, drugs, and protocols, as well as prevention through practices such as recognizing and treating conditions like hypertension and high cholesterol levels.

Organizations Benefit from Leveraging CE

What do learners look for? Taking into account time lost for travel and being away from their practices, the expense involved, and cost of materials, professionals prefer more accessible ways to gain their CE credits. They also want a less intrusive way to gain the newest knowledge to provide better care that results in improved patient outcomes. This is where you come in, demonstrating why CE is essential.

As a director, you may not realize that you could be leveraging and improving paid courses to be higher quality, enhancing them as a competitive differentiator. Strong education programs attract and retain learners and ensure that they will not go to other hospitals, associations, or organizations to receive their CE. They want courses that are easy to use, suit their individual learning styles, and fit into their busy schedules.

EthosCE for Your Continuing Education Platform

EthosCE is a leading user-friendly learning management system (LMS) platform for medical associations, academic medical centers, health systems, and medical education companies. As a CME director, with the single platform technology from EthosCE, you have the tools for curriculum development and administrative tasks. It provides learners with online content that improves their user experience, demonstrates measurable outcomes, and complies with ACCME guidelines. Let’s take a look at how EthosCE can help your CE program and why continuing education is important to your learners.

What you need is content that value to your learners. Failure to do that means they’re out the door to find another CME provider. You have to select the right (and best) LMS that allows you to create multiple courses, gives you control over your administrative tasks, and streamlines the entire compliance process. You want technology that scales as you increase your learner base. EthosCE simplifies your content and program design with enterprise-grade curriculum, data analytics, and administrative options.

The EthosCE LMS can add online quizzes, surveys, and other materials at any point in the course, including pre- and post-test assessments. You have the tools to thoroughly assess your learners, giving them multiple-choice options, true-false queries, and essays, and there’s support for other common question formats. You can also provide feedback to the learner during their assessment, either with information specific to the question or directly relating to their response.

You can create rich, multimedia questions and embed videos, as well as create follow-up assessments that automatically notify the learners based on the intervals you set.

Once they’re done with a course, they’ll receive a customized and branded certificate indicating their course completion.

To keep learners coming back for more—and growing learner numbers is always a good thing—you can send out emails about events and courses that are taking place and when a follow-up assessment is available.

Get the Tools You Need

Board, state, and government CE is mandatory for healthcare professionals, and CM leaders in medical associations, hospitals, and other organizations can increase their recruitment and retention of those medical professionals. EthosCE’s LMS supplies the tools you need to offer quality courses and demonstrates why continuing education is important.

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!