Keep Your Finger On the Pulse of Medicine... through CME

By Jennifer Root, MD

Dr. Jennifer Root, CME Advocate and SCMA Board Liaison to the Continuing Medical Education Committee, shares with us her passion about medical education and the need for a deeper appreciation of continuing this education throughout one's medical career.

In 2003 when I was first elected to the SCMA’s Board of Trustees, I was assigned to be the Board Liaison to the Continuing Medical Education (CME) Committee. I had put together a talk or two for my own county medical society, so I figured I knew what CME was all about. You pick a topic, find a speaker, dig around for financial support to pay for a dinner, and then show up. 

I could not have been more wrong.

Continuing Medical Education is so much more than that. The practice of medicine changes almost daily, with new pharmaceuticals, therapies, surgeries, and new understandings of disease mechanisms. Thousands of scholarly articles are published in our medical journals each year and once you are away from the academic ivory towers, your specialty journals and CME are the heart of the system for keeping up with your profession. 

But, it goes even deeper than self education.  CME is a wonderful tool for physicians and hospitals to partner together to address deficiencies within your own practices. All the QI and tracking data in the world will never improve outcomes or the lives of our patients… unless there is an educational arm to address the problems that the data finds.

Most physicians are unaware of how much the process of receiving CME has changed… it is no longer all about sitting through a lecture anymore. A patient shows up and they have a condition you have never heard of, and you may need to do some research or reading online to find a therapy. This is called Point of Care Internet CME. This is just one example.

Reviewing a manuscript? Writing test questions for a national exam? Giving a lecture?  All of these can generate CME. And, there are even more ways to obtain CME today.

If you see a problem in your own practices or facilities, you can receive large amounts of CME credit for trying to make improvements. ACCME has authorized up to 20 CME credits to be given to physicians that participate in Quality Improvement (QI) projects. A QI project can be something that addresses large things like infection rates, but also small things like improving communication.  First, you identify a problem, then document the problem, come up with something different to try and address it, and finally, re-evaluate to see if that improved the problem. That is the Quality Improvement Project CME in a nutshell. 

You think the admission order set for your MI patients can be improved? Do you feel that your patients aren’t getting the education they need? Can you improve your post operative nausea and vomiting rates? There is no end to areas that we can be inquisitive and apply our scientific ideals and curiosity to problems both great and small that we identify within the practice of medicine. It is these actions that ultimately lead to improvements in outcomes. We are the main arteries that provide the improvements in the lives of our patients… not the hospitals, insurance companies, CMS, or the lawyers. 

I encourage you all to find out how CME can assist you in improving the delivery and quality of your care. Talk to your hospital's CME Department or the SCMA’s CME Committee. We can all appreciate the murmurs in the system that surrounds us…. The question is what do you do about it?