Medical Educators Improving Physician Education with PI-CME

An interview with Natalie Lavelle

The attendees for this conference range from medical students and medical societies to CME and healthcare professionals themselves. Most of the attendees have a vested interest in education and are committed to improving the way we educate our clinicians.

Natalie Lavelle and Andy Hicken will be presenting their session on January 15^th at 9:45 am. Their session will provide the opportunity to learn new ways to design performance improvement so that practitioners can more easily connect data about their practice to educational interventions. The session will also offer ways to help practitioners put what they learn from performance improvement activities into practice, and share best practices for working with technologists. All of this knowledge can be applied to efficiently develop the technology needed to meet requirements for performance improvement.

Natalie Lavelle is Director for Learning Technologies at the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners (NBOME). I had the opportunity to interview Natalie this week before she presented her session with Andy Hicken at the conference. I began by having her explain in her own words a little bit about their session on performance improvement technology.

Natalie then discussed some of the specific topics she was going to cover throughout the presentation.

In this next clip Natalie explains that physicians are seeing statistically significant performance improvement on the quality measures in the NBOME’s modules.

There are some barriers for healthcare educators to overcome in terms of physician resistance to doing these activities. For example, bad press about programs can create a negative response from physicians, who feel that the new MOC and OCC requirements are overly burdensome and prevent them from spending time with their patients, which is what all physicians want to do. The healthcare industry is changing, and quality of care is certainly one of the most important concerns for healthcare professionals today. The rapid change in technology in the medical space, as well as the insights (gleaned from big data) into what works and what doesn’t, makes it really important for doctors to put a greater importance on continuing medical education. I asked Natalie for her opinion on this.

Natalie explains that part of her job is to provide physicians with the best education possible, one that allows them to get back to working with their patients faster instead of taking up too much of their time. I asked her how she thinks technology will help overcome this barrier.

To conclude the interview, Natalie explains what she hopes to get out of the upcoming conference.