How continuing medical education is critical to clinicians being able to do their jobs and make the best of a golden age of scientific discovery.
Learning is central to medical advances and the thirst for knowledge and new skills remains a fundamental ethos, despite the huge burdens faced by healthcare professionals (HCPs) in their training schedules. Clinician time is precious and their attention is firing in all directions as they cope with everincreasing demands, making it difficult to stay current with the latest and greatest advances in healthcare.
In this era of grab-and-go learning, continuing medical education (CME) is being transformed by digital and AI technology, which tailors learning to meet individual HCP needs. This approach enhances patient outcomes and care by delivering education at the most receptive moments for healthcare professionals. This is a dynamic era where clinicians can now be liberated to become enthused, even excited, about the potential to experience a learning journey rather than being on the receiving end of one-off information disposals.
The increased scope to learn is critical, not just for accreditation and knowledge acquisition, but to optimize practice to improve both clinical care and system efficiency so that clinicians can be empowered to function at high levels and avoid the burnout that is blighting the profession.
Recent research highlighted the corrosive impact of stressed workloads, recording that 40% of HCP respondents found that their working conditions made it difficult to stay current with the latest knowledge in their specialty.1
Taking complexity out of learning by offering personalized programs, where the answers needed by a clinician can be easily and swiftly accessed, is the first step on the journey to positive clinical behavior change. They need to keep their knowledge and skills current while also having a hunger to understand how this golden age of scientific advances and novel therapies can provide greater potential to treat rare and difficult conditions. This understanding allows them to personalize their approaches to boost individual patient outcomes.
We know that improving an HCP’s clinical confidence will result in positively affecting their behavior. We also know that confidence shifts don’t occur by simply watching one 30-minute video. They come from serial learning where high-grade clinical information can be primed, reflected on, recalled, and reinforced within a defined learning continuum. Embracing these vital aspects of learning leads to performance improvement.
CME can now deploy a suite of technology and channels backed by human behavior principles and adult learning research. We also have the tools to prime the learner through social media, off-site calls to action, emails, and all the omnichannel opportunities available to communicate and build relationships. We then can guide them toward the next best engagement (NBE), reinforcing their previous learning and evolving their knowledge on a topic. Clinicians have an open, questioning state of mind when they are considering if and how they need to change their practice, along with the cost- benefit implications that might be involved. Trustworthy and reliable content is a critical ingredient to connect successfully and progressively at these moments of need.
“CME can now deploy a suite of technology and channels backed by human behavior principles and adult learning research.”
AI and digital developments have enabled us to understand when and how an HCP wants to engage with, and is more receptive to, knowledge and medical information. This helps create hyper- personalization, taking them on a learning journey—their curated journey—based on their individual learning needs, at all times backed by engaging and trusted content.
By combining traditional omnichannel tools and AI, under the control of human experts, to help process the deluge of data, we can hone in on a clinician’s requirements so that the learning is bespoke and compliant against a backdrop of increasing regulatory requirements to geo-fence information to precise targets and locations. The focus is on both getting the right information to the right clinician while also ensuring inappropriate content is not accessible.
AI enables the delivery of answers tailored to each individual—that would take hours to uncover through journals, online searches, or lengthy symposia—a luxury that many clinicians simply don’t have.
Thankfully, we no longer have to group HCPs as cardiologists, oncologists, or endocrinologists and deliver broad messaging. We can now connect with an individual and create precise packages that have resonance and contribute to creating more efficient and effective healthcare delivery.
“CME is a cuttingedge tool in addressing the growing demands of global healthcare, equipping professionals, with independent, evidence-based information in a compliant manner. It helps them fulfill their vocation and fuel that powerful ‘Never Stop Learning’ ethos.”
The use of behavioral data and adult digital learning principles is a potent advance in medicine as it allows for the technology to crystalize when, where, and how learning can take place and create greater bonds between clinicians and the content they view or are exposed to. It also transforms learning from a less effective one-way push of broadly applicable CME toward the user to a bi- directional flow of data that allows the provider to share content with unprecedented precision.
We can reinforce using several channels to remind them what they learned a day or so later and what the NBE is along the journey, but it is vital that they are all stitched together coherently. If not, they lose the cohesion of a learner journey where the sum is greater than the component parts.
Across the pharma space, it is important to realize that if you want clinical education to be effective, you cannot think of it as the point in time when information is exchanged. All of those learning moments build a body of knowledge that catalyzes confidence and appropriate clinical responses.
Challenges such as reservoirs of data and an array of omnichannel contact points, can make it so that the journey has to be expertly managed to cut out distractions. AI has transformative speed and reach but trust remains a significant issue.
The question of how reliably can an open AI model source the right data points without filling in gaps with hallucinations has yet to be fully satisfied. It is worth remembering that AI is only as good as the data it pulls from. Having trusted updated sources and a human in the loop to verify content, is essential to deliver relevant information. But every interaction with AI brings opportunities to learn, finesse its output, recognize and eliminate misinformation, and deliver only valid content that is evidencebased and relevant.
Medical science is making huge strides; with the landscape fracturing and reforming through and after COVID, there is an imperative to put these advances into practice. Clinicians are under immense time and resource pressure, so they can get on with doing what they do best—treating patients, enhancing their outcomes, and improving public health. I feel strongly that if we can give them some time back, then we will be better able to fight burnout and have more effective clinicians that are going to produce better health outcomes.
CME is a cutting-edge tool in addressing the growing demands of global healthcare, equipping professionals, with independent, evidence-based information in a compliant manner. It helps them fulfill their vocation and fuel that powerful ‘Never Stop Learning’ ethos.
The learner is placed at the heart of the journey and provides them with frictionless access to what they need, when they need it, and underpins their ability to put new knowledge and skills into practice.
