From recognizing the signs of mere certificate seekers to enhancing the match between educational content and clinician expectations, this white paper sheds light on the path to tailor CME programs that not only resonate with medical professionals but also foster impactful learning outcomes.
Two members of the ArcheMedX team received awards at the 2020 Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions Annual Conference, held this year in San Francisco, January 8-11.
Brian McGowan, PhD, FACEHP, ArcheMedx Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer received the Almanac Author of the Year award for his contributions to the ACEhp Almanac. Brian has been a valued member of the Almanac editorial board for the past 3 years, providing significant contributions to the publication as an author and advisor on a variety of articles. Brian also created the community’s first Research to Action: Interview Series, a collection of interviews conducted with key leaders within medical education and beyond.
Michelle Skidmore, MS, ArcheMedX Senior Director, Educational Strategy, was awarded the Distinguished Member Award. Michelle was recognized for her many years of service to the Alliance in a variety of capacities. Michelle served as co-chair of the QIS conference in 2017 and has been recognized for leading multiple sessions and presenting a series of insightful posters at several ACEhp meetings, including the Annual Conference and Alliance Industry Summit.
Congratulations to Brian and Michelle for recognition of their outstanding contributions to the continuing medical education community!
To measure knowledge, we must measure a person’s degree of belief.
As educators, we all strive to transfer knowledge and help our learners achieve mastery on a topic or technique. And as educators, we rely on pre- and post-test comparisons to assess the impact of the education we provide, as well as inform refinements of current activities and identify future education needs – all with the goal of closing gaps and improving patient care. However, the commonly used multiple-choice question employed in almost all CME assessments provides a hidden loophole in the form of guessing. Simply put, a correct answer that was randomly chosen is not an indicator of true knowledge. Traditional multiple-choice assessments are of limited use in our ongoing efforts to develop more effective educational programs that truly address learners’ needs, unless we take our assessment questions a step further.
CBA Digs Deeper
Not all right answers are equally correct, and not all wrong answers are incorrect in the same way. Applying confidence-based assessment (CBA) acknowledges the spectrum of learner responses and provides a bridge from traditional assessment to a more complete picture of a learner’s understanding. When you incorporate CBA into assessments, the results will help you identify those learners who are guessing as well as the ones who have doubt in their understanding, creating additional categories of answers beyond simply correct or incorrect. In this way, CBA shines a spotlight on true educational impact.
The strength of CBA is related to measuring how completely a learner embraces their understanding. Learners who confidently know an answer do not need to guess, while those who are unsure of their knowledge will make a selection based on partial knowledge. To uncover and measure guessing and doubt, CBA gauges a learner’s confidence in their chosen answer. This is done by layering an additional confidence query using some version of the straightforward phrases “I’m sure,” “I think,” and “I’m guessing.” The additional insight is collected for each question as the test is completed, and the confidence information is integrated into the test results, leading to stronger statistical reliability of assessment data.
CBA Research
Understanding the nuances of clinician learning is crucial to the success of education and has an impact on the future performance of learners and the advantages of CBA are particularly valuable in the decision-rich field of medical education, where misplaced reliability can lead to serious consequences.
Research indicates that clinician learners’ realism about their level of knowledge has an effect on their behavior as practitioners. Overconfident practitioners – the “misinformed” learners identified by CBA – present a real risk to patients. These are the ones who may refuse outside opinion and bypass lab tests, possibly delivering an incorrect diagnosis and/or inappropriate treatment plan, with additional risk of complications. Under-confident practitioners – “uninformed” or “in-doubt” learners – may routinely order excessive medical tests in order to be certain of a diagnosis, potentially wasting their patients’ time as well as healthcare resources.
Testing that incorporates CBA provides a robust analysis of healthcare practitioner learning and confidence in what they know, allowing the education provider to direct special attention to learners who are guessing, who lack confidence in their knowledge (the uninformed or in doubt), or have high confidence but are incorrect (the misinformed). This depth of data will identify important unmet learning needs, providing valuable opportunities to improve future assessments that will raise the bar on medical education, future healthcare practitioner performance, and, ultimately, patient outcomes.
Providers of CME/CE for healthcare professionals now can deliver ArcheViewer-powered education initiatives to clinicians across 19 specialties within the Healio.com Education Lab
ArcheMedX is pleased to announce a new collaboration with Healio.com Education Lab. Since the launch of the ArcheMedX digital learning and insights platform in 2013, providers of CME/CE for clinicians have been able to develop and efficiently launch more engaging and impactful online education. And now, with the collaboration established between ArcheMedX and Healio.com Education Lab, providers can leverage Healio’s extensive reach into 19 specialties with the ability of the award-winning ArcheMedX platform to provide more effective education through increased data utilization.
“We are excited that Healio has a new tool, ArcheMedX, to offer providers,” said Meredith Barnes, Senior Account Manager, Healio Education Lab,”and that Providers who already use the ArcheMedX platform will now be able to reach the highly engaged Healio Education Lab audience.”
The foundation of Healio’s powerful platform is delivery of education and information to health care professionals at the specialty and subspecialty level, all while providing an exceptional user experience. Healio’s Education Lab has a loyal following of learners, making it the ideal environment to host educational activities. ArcheMedX continues to innovate in online education with a proven platform that has shown, through several comparative studies, to be significantly more effective than traditional forms of online CME.
“We are excited to increase the distribution network of ArcheMedX through the collaboration with Healio,” states Brian S. McGowan, PhD, FACEHP, Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer at ArcheMedX. “The ability to distribute ArcheViewer activities through Healio’s reach continues our efforts to ensure that more effective learning provided through the ArcheMedX platform is delivered to the right learner at the right time through the education resources that they know and trust.”
To learn more about the ArcheMedX platform and Distribution Partner Network please contact Kenny Cox, VP of CME at [email protected] and to learn more about Healio.com Education Lab please contact Meredith Barnes, Senior Account Manager at [email protected].
As we all know, healthcare continues to evolve in its focus on improving patient care through emerging models that emphasize quality improvement and patient engagement. The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model was engineered to impact both of these issues by replacing the patient at the center of his/her own care in partnership with their primary care team. However, evidence suggests that transformations to the PCMH model can be challenging and often require education and support to help clinicians embrace the functions and attributes that constitute a PCMH.
The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), as the leading certifying organization for PCMH, has partnered with Med-IQ and ArcheMedX to deliver education and resources for its Patient-Centered Medical Home Recognition Program. A recent article in the Alliance Almanac, Strategies for Success: Addressing the (Unique) Needs of the Patient-Centered Medical Home, provides an overview of the educational initiative, outcomes data, positive impact, lessons learned, and plans for continued enhancement.
Brief highlights from the article:
The value of the Strategies for Success model lies in the ability for educational activities to be taken individually or together as a team. The shared learning experience, powered by ArcheTeam, enables participants to view, download and recommend practice-based tools and to engage in team discussions about how to best apply evidence-based approaches to their practice. Additionally, the series offers practice management tips and suggestions for optimizing care, helping the team communicate more effectively and enhancing patient outcomes.
More than 2,000 team members (both clinical and non-clinical) from more than 600 practices have engaged in educational activities across a variety of clinical areas. The transformation to a PCMH model requires ongoing team-based engagement and blended clinical- and process-oriented education as well as strategies that enhance communication and care coordination. It also requires a transformation toward and a commitment to continuous quality improvement. This Strategies for Success pilot found that this model uniquely supports learner and team engagement and has led to significant positive changes in knowledge, attitudes and competence.
Congratulations to the team at NCQA and Med-IQ for development and implementation of an initiative that provides the continuous education and engagement needed for the PCMH model to be successful and sustain practice transformation.
ArcheMedX helps life sciences and healthcare organizations to better equip, evaluate, and predict team and clinician performance
