Creation of Industry-sponsored Continuing Medical Education (CME) Programs

Continuing medical education (CME) consists of educational activities, which serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, professional performance, and relationships that a physician uses to provide services for patients, the public, or the profession. The CME activity must be designed to improve (1) physician competence, and/or (2) physician performance-in-practice, and/or 3) patient outcomes. Besides creating a classical F2F CME, we specialize in delivering Online CME programs which guarantee interactive content, such as video and audio materials, multiple choice and open-ended questions tests (with feedback), flip cards, a discussion forum, match assignments (where the right content must be dragged into the appropriate column), and recorded presentations/lectures including the role-plays. At the same time technical and software knowledge required for our programs is maintained at a minimum. Furthermore, we arrange that all texts, articles and questionnaires (tools and instruments) are downloadable. Our programs are very creative and adaptable as they take into account all forces identified by doctors as the reason for change in their clinical practice routine, such as pressures from patients, colleagues, and healthcare institutions where they work; their personal lives; desire for new and enhanced competence; professional aspirations; stage of career; social and cultural environment of practice settings; curiosity; and a sense of personal and financial well-being (Fox & Bennett, 1998). On the other hand, barriers to change which include low motivation and lack of time are addressed properly, by provision of a relevant CME content, while keeping the assignments less time-consuming.Below is a simplification of our model of CME creation and administration which relies on the approach proposed by Ahmed K et al. (2013).