AOE Compliance Connection – August 2020 Newsletter

Welcome to the August 2020 edition of AOE Compliance Connection, AOE’s monthly newsletter. As summer draws to a close, we hope this finds you and your team enjoying the final weeks of the season and gearing up for a productive fall! This month, AOE’s newsletter includes three featured articles. We’ll continue looking at how social justice connects with CE by providing a recap of an important, recent webinar hosted by the ACCME. Additionally, we will connect you with our annual analysis of the ACCME 2019 Annual Report Data and keep you abreast of upcoming changes to the American Board of Pathology Continuous Certification Program. As always, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for weekly compliance tips and other timely updates!

As part of its Meeting Challenges Together webinar series, the ACCME recently hosted a public conversation on racism and inequity with a focus on how CE professionals can take action to address these problems.

Held on July 13^th, the webinar, “Advancing Social Justice with Accredited Continuing Education,” featured Dr. Aletha Maybank, Chief Health Equity Officer and Vice President at the AMA, and Dr. David Ansell, Senior Vice President for Community Health Equity at Rush University. The educational session included an overview of diversity, inclusion and equity issues in healthcare and CE and provided attendees with a wide range of resources to be used by providers of CE when incorporating social justice initiatives into their accredited programs.

The speakers provided an overview of racial disparities and inequities in healthcare, inclusive of why they exist and how they are perpetuated. Participants were challenged to identify their own biases and were then given strategies for how to enhance objectivity and construct accredited activities in a way that can address systemic inequities

Dr. Maybank and Dr. Ansell provided valuable insight regarding the importance of defining terms and understanding root causes of healthcare inequities. These speakers stressed that diversity and inclusion without building equity into the healthcare system are not enough to effectively address the problem.

Key reflections and actions for those wanting to enhance diversity, inclusion, and equity in their organizations and accredited CE programs were highlighted, and include:

• Be humble and curious, rooted in the understanding that there is always more to learn. CE providers should prioritize listening to those affected by racism and inequity to understand their lived experiences, and have a sense of urgency about these issues.
• Understand that white supremacy is built into all of our systems and institutions, and it is perpetuated by prioritizing individualism over the collective good and by the myths of American Exceptionalism.
• Train, both internally and externally, on implicit bias and anti-racism and teach the history of racism in healthcare.
• Shift resources and capital within organizations to prioritize equity and then track and monitor progress with goals, objectives and outcomes to create accountability.
• Implement equity training in all CE projects and policies regardless of whether equity is the focus of the project.
• Incorporate impacted community members into the planning of programs and activities.

A recording of this webinar can be accessed on the ACCME’s Advancing Social Justice Resources page, which also includes a list of resources for CE providers as they incorporate social justice initiatives into accredited CE programs.

Annually, AOE conducts a detailed analysis of the ACCME’s annual report data across provider-types. AOE’s 2019 analysis and summary includes specific trend analyses to assist in evaluating the large amount of data found within the report.

The ACCME’s 2019 Annual Report data was released on July 31, 2020.  The report highlights continued growth in several key areas, analyzing data from over 1,700 accredited CME providers that offered nearly 190,000 accredited CME activities.  Analysis shows a noteworthy shift in data regarding participants attending CME activities.

For the second straight year, non-physician participants (53%) attending CME activities surpassed physician participants (47%), though non-physician participants decreased in 2019 as compared to 2018. Three-year trend data below illustrates that the number of physician participants has increased by 11.01% while the number of non-physician participants at CME activities has increased by 52.85% since 2017.

The number of physician learners increased in 2019 by nearly two million after remaining steady the previous three years, while the number of non-physician learners decreased for the first time this year by approximately one million. The number of educational activities and participants continue to increase and have each year since 2010.

Effectively, the CME enterprise continues to evolve and make available high-quality, CME activities that promote interprofessional learning and improvements across clinician competence, performance, and patient outcomes.

AOE’s analysis, along with helpful visuals, can be accessed here.