These CME Education Resources Help Your Organization Grow

What do all CME providers want? Streamlined administration, a better online experience for learners, increased revenue… Depending on who you ask, you’re bound to hear a different answer.

But at the most fundamental level, all CME providers want to:

1. Help learners excel as professionals and optimize patient outcomes
2. Broaden the impact of their activities by reaching a larger audience

To achieve those goals, they need comprehensive CME education resources. Data. Insights. Actionable statistics. In other words, they need information about learner participation, performance, and perception. The more detailed and granular that information, the better.

With a keen understanding of those factors, you gain the intelligence you need to deliver valuable educational activities and help your organization grow. It’s how you address both of those fundamental goals.

It all starts with on-demand CME reports.

Following learners’ participation in any CME activity, you might want to know:

• How many learners participated
• How well they performed on the post-test
• Whether post-test results indicate learning
• What types of credit learners request
• Whether evaluation data indicates a positive perception of the content
• How many learners completed activities, claimed credit, and earned a certain post-test score within a given time frame.

And so on. These metrics – and there are dozens of others – are the kinds of insights you need in order to meaningfully assess the performance of your CME activities.

The best way to obtain them? An on-demand reporting dashboard, preferably through your CME software or learning management system (LMS).

It should be easy to access these reports – it should not be an exercise that involves multiple spreadsheets and manual collation of data. Just log in, navigate to a global view of all your reports, and select what you need. Then you can start drilling down.

Here’s how the global view looks in the Rievent Platform:

Having these CME education resources is essential. You need them to identify your activities’ strengths (so that you can continue to capitalize on them) and weaknesses (so you can strive for improvement). To gain maximum value from your CME data, insist on the ability to:

• Capture and report the data at a granular level. Go beyond just tallying participation numbers. Start learning things like how participation levels compare across professions and whether certain learner types (sorted by profession, member status, or otherwise) had a different perception of your activity based on evaluation responses. Yes, you can get that granular.

• Apply filters to better understand your data. After you’ve found the type of data you’re looking for, get even more granular by filtering out information you don’t need. For example, you can view data from just a limited time period – like over a span of two months – or within a specific geographical location.

Of course, automation makes all of this on-demand CME reporting possible. The software collects data in the background as learners complete activities and presents it to you as a report complete with graphical and statistical analysis.

But there’s another kind of automation that also comes in handy – automated outcomes evaluations.

By automating post-activity surveys, you can collect more consistent, reliable outcomes data.

Collecting outcomes data is tough, isn’t it? You’ve got to contact learners after activity completion. In fact, you have to contact them several weeks later. It’s necessary – and you’re doing it – but there are logistical challenges involved.

What if you could integrate outcomes reporting into your activity? You could…

• Add the survey questions to your activity when you create it
• Set a time to distribute the outcomes survey to learners via email
• Forget about administering outcomes surveys (you’ve taken care of it)
• Watch survey data roll in during the weeks after learners complete an activity
• Pull reports on the outcomes data, just like you do for participation, performance, and evaluations

You don’t have to do anything other than create the survey and set the distribution date. The rest just happens.

Ultimately, you’d get reliable, consistent outcomes data that could be a valuable resource for CME professionals within your organization! If that’s a difficult or time-consuming process today, automation can make it simpler and, in many cases, provide higher quality information than you’re getting today.

Here’s how an outcomes report looks in the Rievent Platform:

Think about it this way. At the same time you pull a report on pre-test and post-test results for a particular activity, you could also look at outcomes data. In other words, you could immediately establish connections between pre-activity knowledge, post-activity knowledge, the application of that knowledge in the field, and the impact of that knowledge on patients – all in a matter of minutes.

That’s the power of integrating outcomes surveys into your CME activity. In addition to providing you with quality data, it puts that data in a context you can work with.

This approach helps you collect every conceivable CME performance metric.

It also lets you collect them with minimal effort and access them on demand. In the end, you’ll gain the intelligence you need to help your organization achieve business goals, broaden your educational opportunities, and grow.