Mission & Purpose

CME Mission Statement

The goal of the Einstein Healthcare Network (EHN) Continuing Medical Education Program is to support the overall organization in its work to positively impact the health status of the Network’s region by supporting continuing professional development of physicians and other healthcare providers. The purpose of Continuing Medical Education is to improve the quality of patient care outcomes and facilitate physician competence and performance by offering planned educational experiences throughout the Einstein Network.

To that end, the mission of the EHN Continuing Medical Education Committee and Physician Activity Leaders is to identify and analyze the medical education needs of Einstein Healthcare Network’s medical staff, and to meet these needs by promoting, coordinating and facilitating the planning, implementation, and evaluation of continuing medical education activities.

GOALS

The educational goal of the Continuing Medical Education Program is to offer learning activities and resources that will encourage and facilitate change in physician’s competence, performance, and patient outcomes by meeting the following objectives:

• To provide practicing physicians with high-quality educational activities which serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance and relationships that a physician uses to provide services for patients, the public, or the profession.
• To create and implement policies and procedures that ensure Einstein Healthcare Network’s compliance with the Pennsylvania Medical Society and the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) guidelines including the Essentials for Accreditation of Sponsors of Continuing Medical Education, and Standards for Commercial Support.
• To ensure that educational activities are unbiased, scientifically sound (evidenced based) and offer the most current data available, founded in that body of knowledge and skills generally recognized and accepted by the profession as falling within the basic medical sciences, the discipline of clinical medicine, and the provision of healthcare to the public.

CONTENT AREAS

EHN’s Continuing Medical Education goal is to bolster competence, performance, and/or patient outcomes of primary care physicians, clinical subspecialists and other health care professionals. The scope of the Continuing Medical Education Program is based on the educational needs of the Einstein Healthcare Network staff and faculty as assessed by physician, staff, and patient feedback, quality assessment and improvement activities, and current developments in the medical sciences and health care industry. The scope of activities includes disease pathogenesis, diagnosis, clinical management, patient safety, and other aspects of the discipline of clinical medicine, basic medical sciences, and health care delivery.

TARGET AUDIENCE

The intended audience for Continuing Medical Education activities is physicians of all specialties. Activities are designed to educate and challenge both full-time and voluntary physicians; activities also are made available to other staff and non-staff health care professionals. The Continuing Medical Education Committee will consider joint sponsorship of RSS-CME activities with local societies or groups in which Einstein Healthcare Network physicians are serving in leadership positions.

TYPES OF ACTIVITIES PROVIDED

Activities that will inform, update and educate the target audience utilizing independent presentations, departmental grand rounds, case conferences, specialty-focused seminars, symposiums, and departmental and/or multi-discipline-focused morbidity and mortality conferences. Activities include both live and enduring materials.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Continuing Medical Education programs are intended to enhance physician and other health professionals training and influence their behavior for the purpose of improving health outcomes. In order to achieve these results, the following goals have been established:

• Provide learning opportunities to accommodate the educational needs (gaps in competence, performance, or patient outcomes) identified through needs assessment, data collection, regulatory changes, and updates in medical standards of care
• Improve access to information concerning the latest evidence-based standards of patient care
• Review and revise as EHN’s continuing medical education processes, concentrating on identifying challenges as well as upcoming CME changes in guidelines or policy

EHN’s Continuing Medical Education Office will conduct data collection and analysis to explore educational, performance, and clinical outcomes related to the offerings. Evaluation indicators will include one or more of the following metrics:

• Attendance data
• Programming assessment: satisfaction with the content and presentation
• Competence assessment: self-reported knowledge gain, post-activity knowledge assessment, skill demonstration
• Performance change assessment: self-reported anticipated behavior change, departmental/quality data
• Trends in hospital data concerning patient care