Partnering to Distribute Smaller, More Flexible, (yet) Engaging CE

I am thrilled to share a big announcement from ArcheMedX, one that will provide the CE community with increasingly simple ways to leverage our flagship product, the ArcheViewer learning platform. Beginning this week, providers of continuing education for healthcare professionals can now leverage the ArcheViewer when developing smaller, more flexible, and/or stand-alone educational interventions. To ensure that these smaller and simpler interventions can be efficiently delivered to learners, we have partnered with six of the leading distributors of online CE (CMEUniversity, ACE/CMEZone, Elsevier CME, freeCME.com, myCME, and ReachMD) to create and launch the ArcheViewer Distribution Partner Network (AVDPN).

The goal of the ArcheViewer Distribution Partners Network is straightforward: to match educational providers with a leading network of Distribution Partners thereby simplifying the planning and delivery of smaller, more flexible ArcheViewer-powered educational designs while maintaining high quality standards and educational impact.

By establishing the AVDPN we hope to meet the demand within the CE community to leverage the ArcheViewer learning platform in more flexible ways to impact learning and practice change. And, by bringing together many of the most respected distributors of online continuing education, we are making it easier and more cost effective to deliver the right educational activities to the right learners all within the online environments that millions of learners have come to rely upon and trust.

For the past 18 months the Team at ArcheMedX has focused its attention on supporting the CE community by helping them plan, implement, deliver, and analyze connected series of educational interventions. This “mini-curricular” model ensured that our Partners could create robust and, in many ways, transformative educational initiatives. These initial interventions allowed us to demonstrate that ArcheViewer-powered education delivers a more engaging and structured learning experience that increases completion rates, simplifies learning, improves competency, and positively impacts performance in practice (see recent learning outcomes data). Importantly, these data taught us that many of these same benefits are evident even after a learner’s first experience with ArcheViewer-powered lessons, validating the simplicity and viability of the learning platform in smaller and more flexible educational interventions.

The decision to allow the CE community to leverage the ArcheViewer for “…smaller, more flexible, and/or stand-alone educational interventions” is not a decision we are taking lightly – quite the opposite in fact. As many of you know, we have repeatedly turned down Educational Partners over the past 16 months who asked to leverage the ArcheViewer learning platform to deliver stand-alone educational interventions. While this was a difficult decision, we did so because it was our belief (at the time) that learners would need the repeated experience with multiple ArcheViewer-powered lessons before they would feel comfortable using the learning architecture and actively engage in their lifelong learning. But, as the data and learning outcomes from dozens of ArcheViewer-powered lessons have now revealed, our hypothesis was a bit too conservative. Learners DO actively engage in the learning actions elements of the learning experience their first time through, and at significant levels, driving the exceptional learning outcomes we have seen to date.

This is a great example of evidence guiding the educational interventions:  for example, in one recent four-part web-series developed by AcademicCME and distributed by Elsevier, we found that of the hundreds of learners participating in the series: ~50% completed multiple lesson in the series while ~50% completed only one lesson (though which lesson it was varied across all four of the available topics). This is why the web-series or curriculum-based model is so valuable – learners can consume as much or as little of the educational as they want and they can move between the lessons in which ever order these choose. It is why we have been advocating for this model from day one. But what we found as an overwhelmingly positive surprise in these early analyses is that even those learners who completed only one lesson in the series derived significant benefit, for example their changes in knowledge and competence as measured by pre-test/post-test performance were no different than the learners who completed two, three, or four lessons in the series and who therefore might be presumed to have increasing comfort with the learning environment. So, while the learners who engaged in multiple connected lessons benefited from that additional investment in their lifelong learning, the learners who participated in only one lesson (as if it was a stand-alone, web-based program) still derived significant improvements in learning and competence.