AOE Compliance Connection – June 2022 Newsletter

Welcome to the June edition of AOE Compliance Connection, AOE’s monthly newsletter. In this month’s newsletter, we are happy to share helpful information about the ACCME Academy and the CE Educator’s Toolkit – both indispensable resources for your CE team. We also launch a new series where we take you behind the scenes to meet some of AOE’s team members to learn about why they love their work (and share a fun fact or two about themselves)! Our monthly newsletter is one of many ways we keep you in the know. Follow our weekly compliance tips on Twitter and Facebook or email us at inquire@aoeconsulting.com with any questions.

The ACCME Academy, launched June 1, 2021, was exclusively designed to be an “educational home for the continuing education (CE) community”. Since its inception, the ACCME Academy has offered accredited providers free access to interactive courses, multimedia, and plentiful resources targeted at enhancing the value of CE.

Primarily, the ACCME Academy offers courses and curricula that assist providers in designing and delivering accredited education that is engaging and effective. Special focus exists in areas like faculty development and achieving Accreditation with Commendation. A few additional features include: support tools and resources for fulfilling accreditation requirements, using PARS, engaging both clinicians and patients as partners in CE teaching and planning. Additionally, the Academy is working towards creating a community for educators to learn from and with one another.

All accredited providers are welcome to join and can create three user accounts (at no charge). If you cannot access your enrollment key (emailed to providers after the launch of ACCME Academy), the primary contact can email academy@accme.org for help. If you need more than three accounts, you can also email that same address for information on your next steps.

For more information about the ACCME Academy, visit this page.

The ACCME’s library of resources designed to equip CE providers now includes the CE Educator’s Toolkit, specifically designed to provide best practices and guidelines for delivering effective continuing education. The toolkit, designed by the Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME), can be downloaded here.

The toolkit argues for its own necessity, citing that CE interventions in general are most effective when promoting “critical thinking, collaboration, and decision-making skills” as these methods encourage team performance and behavior change in healthcare workers. The toolkit, thus, aims to provide best practices and guidelines that focus on three key interventions:  (1) facilitation of small group learning, (2) case-based learning, and (3) reflective learning.

The toolkit, a 189-page PDF document, contains mini case scenarios, guiding questions for providers to reflect upon, evaluation tools, and an overall integrated approach. A self-assessment checklist will help providers honestly inventory their team’s CE planning preparedness.

Providers are welcome to download the CE Educator’s Toolkit here and can also download a worksheet guide for the toolkit here.