Step IV: Assessing the Impact of Your Activity
You began the process of planning your CME activity by exploring the practice gaps relevant to your learners and
choosing a performance area that you wished to address.
You identified the learning needs of your targeted audience related to that clinical problem and then developed the
learning objectives that you wished to focus on in your CME event.
You tailored the learning environment and the educational format of your activity to be the most effective means for
participants to learn what they needed.
You put on your event, meeting or conference and hopefully it all goes successfully!
But at this point you really don't know whether you've accomplished your goal.
You still have a responsibility to evaluate the impact of your activity.
The goal is to see whether you enhanced the learners confidence or competence, changed their practice behaviors, or impacted
health outcomes in their patient populations.
The Office of CME at Stritch works with you to gather data related to these types of outcomes, in order to get information on the impact
of your activity.
This process fulfills the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle espoused by Deming et al. that should govern all activities.
- Plan: You are aware of a practice based problem, and have come up with an educational intervention to help address the problem.
- Do: You put on the educational activity hoping to impart knowledge, change behaviors, improve performance, impact health outcomes.
- Study: You collect information to analyze whether you were successful or not.
- Act: Applying what you have learned from your analysis, you prepare to enter into a new planning phase intent on addressing the residual gaps in the future.
We thank you for taking the time to learn what we believe is relevant for you know as a CME Course Director...
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