Impress your Stakeholders

First and foremost identify your stakeholders. For all accredited providers, one of your stakeholders will be the ACCME or your State Medical Society for whom you need to provide data regarding the outcomes of your programs. If you are a provider who seeks and secures funding from the pharmaceutical industry, they are another stakeholder that will want to see data to show change in performance. For those who do not accept commercial support, your stakeholders might be your CME Committee and your organization executives that want to see improved patient care and performance in practice resulting from the education. Finally, an often forgotten but extremely important stakeholder is your learner. Learners rarely get any feedback from activities they attend. As a result, it can be very difficult to get their input on follow-up surveys.

Stakeholders want to know that their investment in the learning activity was worthwhile, meaningful. At this point, CME providers usually bring out the marching band and data gurus to perform their magic, throwing chart after chart up as evidence of learning. The problem is that most data experts do a poor job of relating to their audience and most educated and talented CME educators are not data savvy. There is a major disconnect; communications are broken. Confused stakeholders may not be willing to invest again. If poorly summarized, stakeholders may lose their faith in your data. This is unfortunate because the data we so carefully collect are truly diamonds in the rough. In most cases, data are collected but no one knows quite what to do with this information.

Solutions and Benefits

Regardless of who your stakeholders are, let us help you to provide meaningful outcomes information. We have moved past the days where declarative knowledge or even procedural knowledge is the end goal. Stakeholders want to see meaningful improvement in performance and patient care outcomes.

• We help you determine the data you need to collect (demographics, matching scores to learning objectives, learner perception of the depth of new knowledge, how learners plan to change their practice).
• We can assist you with developing a process for data collection (LMS, surveys, Tableau business intelligence tools).
• We provide data analysis and reporting that demonstrates learner satisfaction with the activity; the degree to which learning objectives were able to close or eliminate the identified practice gap; how your learners put what they learned into practice; and how patient care has improved following the education activity.