Hands-on Education: Make It Practical

The Status of CME
For years, we’ve been educating physicians about the latest therapies and medical devices. However, equal emphasis should now be placed on helping them to integrate the educational information into changes in performance and to navigate the complexities of the current healthcare system to ensure that barriers to implementation are removed or overcome.

Diagnostic and therapeutic challenges faced by physicians continue to increase, while the escalating requirements and expectations of insurance companies leave them (and their patients) exasperated. The end result is that physicians are left to figure out how to do it all.

As CME providers, how can we continue to help physicians overcome the barriers of improving their clinical practice? The answer may be simpler than you think: Use CME to complete the educational cycle and provide clinicians with tools and strategies to implement what we've taught them.

Make it Simple
In a recent CME activity, clinicians were educated about a new surgical procedure and how to coordinate patient follow up with their non-physician staff. This single educational intervention resulted in a profound reduction in adverse events noted after the procedure due to improved patient screening before the procedure and follow up at the right time. Patient care and health outcomes were improved. How was this accomplished? By giving physicians a simple plan of action to implement what was taught. Of equal importance, the activity raised awareness of potential barriers that should be avoided in the physicians' clinical practices.

If we develop CME activities that address the administrative realities of modern clinical practice, the results can be profound. Here are a few ideas to consider:

• Provide education that gives a hands-on or informal discussion component to accelerate integration into physicians’ clinical considerations.
• Addresses the administrative components of the physicians' and non-physicians’ daily duties.
• Include resource materials that can serve as follow up education that can reinforce and sustain the learning related to the content of the CME activities.

Efforts such as these can arm clinicians with strategies that can be put into practice immediately and may contribute to improvements in patient care.

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