Medical
Education
t’s vital that medical providers stay current with recent developments and the latest threats in the healthcare field. Challenges like the coronavirus outbreak—which emerged in China in December and has since spread across the globe—require that medical professionals stay current on the latest prevention and treatment options available. This is pertinent to making decisions and providing care to the community while keeping providers and their staff safe by reducing transmission, according to Susan Gorba, medical educator for Providence Health & Services Alaska.
That’s where continuing medical education (CME) comes into play. CME allows healthcare professionals to maintain competence and learn about new and developing areas of their field. “By offering continuing medical education, we are bringing current information to our providers and helping them to remain current with their medical knowledge,” Gorba says.
Medical
Education
t’s vital that medical providers stay current with recent developments and the latest threats in the healthcare field. Challenges like the coronavirus outbreak—which emerged in China in December and has since spread across the globe—require that medical professionals stay current on the latest prevention and treatment options available. This is pertinent to making decisions and providing care to the community while keeping providers and their staff safe by reducing transmission, according to Susan Gorba, medical educator for Providence Health & Services Alaska.
That’s where continuing medical education (CME) comes into play. CME allows healthcare professionals to maintain competence and learn about new and developing areas of their field. “By offering continuing medical education, we are bringing current information to our providers and helping them to remain current with their medical knowledge,” Gorba says.
CME is closely associated with physicians who seek to demonstrate that they have participated in educational activities and obtained CME credit to document meeting the requirements of state medical boards, medical specialty societies, specialty boards, hospital medical staff, the Joint Commission (formerly the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations), insurance groups, and others. In practice, CME allows doctors—who typically spend four years in medical school and three to five years in residency training—to expand their expertise throughout their professional career. It can help them drive improvements in practice and optimize the care, health, and wellness of patients. “Whether physicians work in clinical care, research, healthcare administration, executive leadership, or other areas of medicine, accredited CME is designed to be relevant to their needs, practice-based, and effective,” the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) states on its website.
Foundation Health Partners
Foundation Health Partners
As another example, the state of Alaska also requires emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to complete CME for their recertification. EMTs can earn CME in a variety of ways, depending on their needs and interest. They can take certain amounts of CME training courses per certification period, including advanced cardiac life support, advanced burn support, basic trauma life support, CPR, anatomy, and physiology.
EMTs can also receive up to twelve hours of CME per certification period for serving as an examination proctor, simulated patient and/or certifying officer, according to the Public Health Division of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. Another option is self-study CME that includes internet-based CME training, as well as EMS-related videotapes and magazines.
Continuing Medical Education
Continuing education is essential in all industries and relevant material is needed to support ongoing learning, Gorba says. “In order to be knowledgeable and current in your specialty, the education for that gap must come from somewhere,” she says. “Advances are made very quickly in healthcare and maintaining relevance can be a challenge…To get our providers to engage with continuing education, we need to provide content that will improve the knowledge, competence, and performance.”
To Shane Coleman, continuing education is about staying current and effective, among other things. “It’s brushing up on things that you’ve already studied to make sure you have a good knowledge base to ensure you’re providing good care,” says Coleman, a psychiatrist and medical director of the Behavioral Services Division for Southcentral Foundation.
While CME allows professionals to maintain their medical license and credentialing at the hospitals where they see patients, it also offers added benefits. For instance, it fosters the improvement of a provider’s daily medical practice. “We accomplish that by promoting new technologies, rapidly changing advances and treatments in their fields,” Gorba says. “CME can also provide [professionals] the ability to network and advance their careers.”
For Coleman, one of the key benefits of CME is having the ability to interact with peers on a professional and social level. This allows him to build networks within his specific field, which can be extremely helpful. He explains, “Building that network is important because there are times when you might have questions, or you might see something unusual.”
Like most professionals, Coleman engages in CME to meet board and state-level requirements. He typically attends at least one conference a year, which often affords him the opportunity to spend multiple days dedicated solely to continuing education. “So if you’re required to get twenty-five CMEs a year, you might be able to knock out all your requirements in a single conference,” he says.
Foundation Health Partners
For Coleman, one of the key benefits of CME is having the ability to interact with peers on a professional and social level. This allows him to build networks within his specific field, which can be extremely helpful. He explains, “Building that network is important because there are times when you might have questions, or you might see something unusual.”
Like most professionals, Coleman engages in CME to meet board and state-level requirements. He typically attends at least one conference a year, which often affords him the opportunity to spend multiple days dedicated solely to continuing education. “So if you’re required to get twenty-five CMEs a year, you might be able to knock out all your requirements in a single conference,” he says.
Foundation Health Partners
According to the AMA’s website, physicians can earn AMA PRA Category 1 Credit in three ways: by participating in certified activities sponsored by US-based CME providers accredited by either the ACCME or an ACCME-recognized State Medical Society; by participating in certain activities recognized by the AMA as valid educational activities; and by participating in certain international activities recognized by the AMA. Activities certified for this category include live events, journal-based CME to test item writing, internet point of care learning, and participating in a residency or fellowship program.
Foundation Health Partners
In Alaska, a licensee must complete fifty CME hours in AMA Category I, AOA Category I or II, a current AMA PRA, or a current certification by a specialty board recognized by the AMA or AOA, or participate in an approved residency/fellowship program, according to Gorba. The license cycle for a medical doctor is generally two years.
Southcentral Foundation
Southcentral Foundation
Physicians can identify legitimate AMA PRA Category 1 Credit activities by making certain the activity is certified by an accredited CME provider. Incidentally, the AMA requires accredited CME providers to trademark the credit phrase (“AMA PRA Category 1 Credit”). If credit is not indicated this way, physicians should question whether the activity is in fact eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit.
In Alaska, Foundation Health Partners is a legitimate provider unit for continuing medical education through the Washington State Medical Association. It’s also a provider unit for nursing contact hours through the Montana Nurses Association. “Our approved provider status allows us to independently plan and implement educational activities that are designed to meet the learning needs of our staff and providers while awarding continuing education hours needed to maintain licensure,” Gehrke says.
Foundation Health Partners provides many of its own classes, which are almost always free to its staff and employed physicians. When there is a cost for a class, such as speaker travel or an honorarium, the funds generally come from the department requesting the education. “We are sometimes able to obtain funds from other agencies, such as medevac companies, in exchange for having a vendor table at the educational event,” Gehrke says. “If we do have a cost for the education, we try to make it as low as possible. For example, we offered a bear mauling class in 2019 that was co-sponsored by LifeMed Alaska and Interior Region EMS Council. Because of these sponsorships, the cost per participant was only $20.
“Participants can sometimes attend an educational event during the workday, but most often staff plan their continuing education for their days off,” Gehrke continues. “For physicians, a one-hour event during their clinic lunch hour seems to work best, so we have most of our physician-specific education [from] noon to 1 p.m. on weekdays.”
Like Foundation Health Partners, ANTHC also takes a strong role in supporting and encouraging continuing medical education. The mission statement for its CME program states: “The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium Continuing Education mission is to ensure quality-learning opportunities, providing improved changes of competence and performance for our healthcare professionals, while improving patient outcomes demonstrated in best practice services for our people and the Alaska Tribal Health System.”
ANTHC currently covers the costs of accredited live CME—as well as continuing nursing education—events for its employees, Fielder says. Plus, it has a vast library available through its learning management system with online, at-work, or from-home access.
Medical professionals can find CME in many ways, depending on their needs at the time, Gorba says. For example, some CME is offered in exotic places where professionals can vacation and take some much-needed time off while obtaining their education. Providers can also find learning opportunities online, where they can participate on their own time and from their own couch. “Still others may look locally for training offered at a local hospital or their own facility where they see patients,” she says. “That education can be more skills-based and offer hands-on training, i.e., learning how to use bedside ultrasound for diagnosis to expand your skill set. The challenge is finding the training you need to fill the gap you have.”
Southcentral Foundation for Behavioral Health also offers events that allow participants to obtain CME credits, according to Coleman. It turns different trainings and leadership development activities into viable opportunities providers can use to meet their CME requirements.
Simulation training has also increased in the last few years. Gehrke explains: “When I went to nursing school in the ‘90s, we practiced everything on real patients. Now we train in the simulation lab with high fidelity manikins… for new procedures or low volume/high risk skills or situations that we don’t see often enough to be proficient.”
She adds: “Our simulation nurses, Lori Gibertoni and Stacy Wright, do an amazing and creative job of making everything as realistic as possible. They have a vomiting intubation manikin (the ‘vomikin’) that they made with an intubation head we had and a drill from a local hardware store. Anything that we can do to create realism makes the training that much more meaningful.”
Within the field of psychiatry, Coleman has noticed more professionals investing in completing addiction CMEs lately. More specifically, treatment for opioid abuse is a popular online CME course that people are taking. Another popular CME is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, which is increasingly being used to treat trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Gorba is also seeing diverse CME trends unfolding. For example, there are online, interactive, and on-demand options for providers who have less time available for various reasons. “The electronic health record has made some things easier and some things more difficult for providers,” she says. “Some may go home for the evening only to find themselves having to continue documenting for three or four hours after they get home. The shortages in physicians has found us now reaching out in new ways to deliver care, like telemedicine. These newer advances in technology also inspire us to provide CME about the ethics and liability of telehealth.”
Continuing, Gorba says: “To remain vital and make a difference in competence, performance, and patient outcomes, we need to fill the needs of our providers. Continuing medical education is not only a requirement but a responsibility of every hospital. When there is a gap in practice or a specific need for training, the CME educator can provide what is needed and improve patient care.”