6 Must-Have Features of the Best Doctors Continuing Education Programs

Today’s medical field is constantly changing. The traditions of how healthcare is delivered are being met with new technologies, practices, and innovations.

For doctors, taking continuing education courses is a given: they must refine skills, meet licensing requirements, keep up with the latest developments, work with medical teams in other areas, and most importantly, improve patient outcomes.

As a director, you need to recognize their needs when planning your doctors continuing education courses because it’s critical to deliver your best CME.

Let’s examine what features doctors look for in continuing education programs, as well as a service that helps you improve completion rates and drive overall learner satisfaction, giving you bigger wins.

1. Quality Content That Enables Active Learning

The quality of your content is essential to your learners. Engage them with rich media courses that also incorporate the requirements for Criterion 35, which is an ACCME mandate. Just having a CE is one part. Add three other formats that involve educational approaches, M & M conferences, and enduring materials like print, audio, video, interactive content, podcasts, webinars, and other web-based activities.

Doctors are looking for learning opportunities that enable the use of these formats and provide interactivity, instant feedback, and active learning. Research has shown that adult learners respond more positively to active, self-directed, and results-oriented learning opportunities compared to passive learning, like traditional lectures and textbooks. When offered with numerous interactive elements, your doctors continuing education courses give learners the ability to collaborate and engage in their self-directed learning.

One form of active learning is known as think-pair-share. For example, you could offer a CE course on the COVID-19 novel coronavirus and present ways to recognize, diagnose, and treat this illness, which is made even more challenging as multiple current possible symptoms increase. Assign pairs of learners to research the topic and present their findings and treatment decisions. Think-pair-share is easily adaptable to online CE courses when you have message boards and assigned peer learning groups. EthosCE uses discussion boards, social media, and email contact too, so there’s an entire social learning environment available for your CE courses.

2. Online Accessibility

Content should be accessible from any place and at any time. When it comes to e-learning, your doctors continuing education should be available from a variety of devices, including laptops, smartphones, or tablets.

3. Learner Engagement

Why is learner engagement important?

A Lena VanNiewenborg study shows how adult learners respond to information, which should apply to your courses.

• Learners are results oriented and want to know why it’s important to learn something, what they have to do to learn the material, and what they’ve been taught afterward.
• Adults want to exercise control over the techniques and goals used in the learning environment.
• Learners have many life experiences and knowledge, so you must provide them with content that incorporates this.
• Adults learn best when knowledge is presented in a real-life context.
• Learners are more motivated when new information can help them solve significant problems in their lives and work.

4. Ease of Use

For doctors continuing education, you want your courses to be easy to use. If it’s challenging and gets in the way of learning, you run the risk of courses going uncompleted or learners who have abandoned them altogether.

Use an LMS that has a simple, linear course workflow so your learners will never get lost. EthosCE has icons that show your learners’ location in the module so they know what’s coming up next. Learners also receive reminders when they’re ready for the next step, and they can always return to the component that they were previously working on.

5. Course Offerings That Meet ACCME and AMA Requirements

You must provide your learners with courses that meet ACCME and AMA requirements. Your courses should have educational approaches, M & M conferences, and internet-enduring materials, like video, webinars, and podcasts. Courses are moving away from the traditional classroom toward media that’s engaging and supplies the required credits for their licensing, certifications, and recertifications.

6. A Service That Helps You Score Big with Your Learners

In order to expand your learner numbers and their course completion rates, EthosCE’s LMS Concierge Service keeps you at the innovative end of your CE courses.

This professional service increases the number of activities that your CPD office can create and design, and it is valuable if you have limited resources. It improves your work by handing off menial, repetitive tasks so your time can be better spent on your CE courses. You benefit from the service’s ability to help you get your courses online quickly; this way, you spend more time on innovation and less time worrying about the administrative side. EthosCE’s LMS is also affordable, offering flat-fee pricing.

The Features That Doctors Are Looking For and the Service That Helps You Out

It’s your job to increase learners’ course completion and their overall satisfaction with your doctors continuing education courses. Using a full-service concierge service from EthosCE takes away your CPD office tasks, so you are free to do what you do best: provide your learners with quality courses.

Find out more about the features and benefits of the EthosCE LMS concierge service. Schedule a 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today!