The Continuing Medical Education Project
What is a CME?
Continuing Medical
Education – or CME – is pretty much what it
sounds like: “…a specific form of continuing education (CE) that helps
those in the medical field maintain competence and learn about new and
developing areas of their field” (en.wikipedia.org). Each state
mandates how many hours of CME health professionals must earn every
year to maintain their licenses. Each state’s requirements vary
slightly and some have subject content specified along with number of
hours. For a look at the 2010 regulations, see the American Medical
Association’s summary here: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1
/pub/upload/mm/40/table16.pdf
(the average is 40 hours every 2 years).
There are also non-CME courses that don’t count towards
license renewal but may be useful to individual providers. Non-CMEs
usually target a specific treatment or therapy, and are usually
delivered by sponsoring organizations/corporations. What is the
difference between CME units and non-CME units? The biggest difference
is bias. Ethically speaking, CMEs are supposed to be objective and
informative, similar to scientific publication. And just as in
publication, any conflicting financial relationships are supposed to be
disclosed up front. Non-CMEs, on the other hand, usually focus on
specific treatments or therapies and are assumed to be biased toward
those from the outset. This doesn’t make non-CMEs evil by definition!
But the smart reader always looks for potential sources of conflict
when deciding which information to use. Recently, CMEs have been
scrutinized more carefully because so many were being sponsored by
pharmaceutical companies. In response, certifying agencies such as the
Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (covering the U.S.,
Canada, Great Britain, and Europe) were formed to oversee the CME
creation process.
For health providers, CMEs are a fact of life. CMEs worth
higher credit hours
are usually offered at professional conferences;
health providers pay for the conference, but may pay relatively little
for the particular CME course. Recently, another model for smaller CMEs
has emerged, hosted by specific institutions or companies via
the web. Fortunately, web-based CMEs are usually free of charge. These
CMEs vary tremendously in subject and length. Generally speaking, the
shorter the CME, the less credit is conferred, with some CMEs counting
for as little as .25 a unit hour. However, these shorter ones can be
finished in as little as 15 minutes, and provide excellent, highly
focused insight into a particular area of health practice.
The CME Project
For your final project, you will work with a small group to create a short, highly focused CME, similar to the ones that count for .25 a credit hour. The audience will be a mix of general and some specialist practitioners. You will be given a specific template to work with that reflects what is found on the “simpler” kinds of web-based CMEs, such as on Medscape. Your group will deliver the CME as though at a conference, in a final presentation lasting approximately 20 minutes (including Q/A time).
NEXT
