The ACCME is taking its show on the road to enhance member understanding of its new accreditation model.
Murray Kopelow, MD, ACCME chief executive, touched on the model at the AMA task force meeting in Baltimore. Providers get another chance to air concerns at next month’s Alliance for CME meeting in Phoenix.
“The ACCME strongly believes that CME, and the people in it, are an important asset to all those trying to address quality and safety issues in healthcare,” Kopelow told MM&M. “ACCME and its colleague organizations are working hard to support this repositioning.”
Providers must begin their transition to the group’s Revised Accreditation Model and Updated Criteria by November 2008. One of the haziest areas for them involves addressing learner knowledge gaps in an effective, measurable way.
“The updated criteria ask the provider to be able to know about their own effectiveness—not to prove it—and improve where improvement is called for,” Kopelow said. That requires having a “data-driven process” for knowing the extent to which they have been able to meet their own change mission.
Knowing what kind of data can be assessed against the mission will present “a stumbling block for a lot of us,” said Marissa Seligman, VP, compliance, Pri-Med. One difficulty is figuring out what kinds of collaborations can offer this data. Another is ascribing a specific CME intervention to a specific outcome.
While Kopelow did not define collaboration under the new criteria, he gave an example of how providers can partner by designing activities around other groups’ screening checklists, many of which appear in the public health literature.
The work won’t be easy, but “the CME enterprise must do more to engage itself in effective performance and quality improvement if we are to remain part of the equation for continuing professional development,” said Steven Singer, PhD, co-director and director, education services, PeerPoint Medical Education Institute.
From the December 01, 2006 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
