Ingenious Med Receives Official Status as a 2010 PQRI Registry

ATLANTA, August 17, 2010 – Ingenious Med has completed an extensive vetting process by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to achieve official status as a 2010 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) Registry, the company announced Tuesday.

The process involved verification of Ingenious Med’s expertise in measure implementation, validation of processing of physician responses and confirmation in the ability to submit performance data in accordance with established CMS guidelines.

Using information technology to improve patient care

Here's an upcoming webinar that may be of interest:

Making a case for IT: How two healthcare organizations used information technology to improve patient care

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is offering billions of dollars in subsidies to healthcare providers to stimulate the use of IT. But plenty of organizations are already innovators in their use of IT to improve overall operations and improve delivery of care.

Modern Healthcare's second annual IT Case Study Contest recently profiled five such organizations. Attend this webcast to learn more from two of the winners, including:

    * How IT is being used to improve care and delivery
    * Strategies for seeking funding under the federal stimulus law
    * How IT is working as a driver toward financial efficiencies

Date and time:
August 25, 2010
8am pacific | 10am central | 11am eastern

Visit ModernHealthcare.com/Webcast8 to register.

CME outcomes measurements: 7 levels (Moore's pyramid)

"Outcomes" has been a buzzword in the continuing medical education (CME) industry over the past several years. Are CME activities leading to meaningful improvements in patient care? Or, are we educating physicians with trivial facts that are not translating into better health care?

Last year, an article was published titled, "Achieving desired results and improved outcomes: Integrating planning and assessment throughout learning activities." In this article, Moore updates the 6-levels of CME outcomes to 7 levels.

Here's an abstract:

Most physicians believe that to provide the best possible care to their patients, they must commit to continuous learning. For the most part, it appears the learning activities currently available to physicians do not provide opportunities for meaningful continuous learning. At the same time there have been increasing concerns about the quality of health care, and a variety of groups within organized medicine have proposed approaches to address issues of physician competence and performance. The authors question whether CME will be accepted as a full partner in these new approaches if providers continue to use current approaches to planning and assessing CME. A conceptual model is proposed for planning and assessing continuous learning for physicians that the authors believe will help CME planners address issues of physician competence, physician performance, and patient health status.

You can download the full version of this article here (PDF).

Moore DE Jr, Green JS, Gallis HA. Achieving desired results and improved outcomes: integrating planning and assessment throughout learning activities. J Contin Educ Health Prof. 2009 Winter;29(1):1-15.

Stanford gets $3 million from Pfizer for CME (but it's not what you think)

Stanford University has received a $3 million educational grant from Pfizer. The funds are to go into developing continuing medical education (CME) activities for physicians. What's rather ironic is that in September 2008, "Stanford became the first medical school in the country to limit industry influence on continuing medical education programs by accepting industry support only for a broad range of activities, not for specific, designated programs."

The latest $3 million received from Pfizer was under a new model of medical education.

Under the new model, Stanford will use a new, $3 million, three-year grant from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to design and implement a novel curriculum that uses a variety of advanced technologies and teaching methods, including simulated and immersive learning tools. The Pfizer grant comes with no conditions, and the company will not be involved in developing the curriculum...

The new curriculum is being designed by a group of physicians at Stanford who have a special interest in new educational approaches. It will focus on interactive methods, rather than the traditional CME method of passive, lecture-based courses, as studies have shown interactive learning is a far more effective way for improving physician practice...

Curriculum topics will be chosen based on areas of practice determined by Stanford as having room for improvement, Jackler said. For instance, it may target efforts to reduce surgical infections, improve diabetes management, help prevent patient readmissions for heart failure and increase patient use of smoking-cessation programs. The goal of the teaching program is to produce measurable improvements in patient care.

Read more at Stanford's website.
You can also read the 15-page proposal here.

Moore's 7 Levels of CME Outcomes Measurements

In the world of certified CME (continuing medical education), outcomes measurements have become a critical component. It is an ACCME (Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education) requirement to measure outcomes in all certified CME activities.

Donald E. Moore Jr., PhD from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine has outlined a framework for the assessment of continuous learning and traditionally this has been presented as a pyramid consisting of 6 different levels:

1. Participation
2. Satisfaction
3. Learning
4. Performance
5. Patient health
6. Population health

Moore DE. A framework for outcomes evaluation in the continuing professional development of physicians. In: Davis D, Barnes BE, Fox R, eds. The Continuing Professional Development of Physicians: From Research to Practice. Chicago, Ill: American Medical Association; 2003.

Earlier this year, Moore published a paper titled, "Achieving desired results and improved outcomes: Integrating planning and assessment throughout learning activities." Here, he makes some modifications to this six-level framework and we now have 7 levels for CME outcomes measurements. The main changes are:

• Level 3 is now broken up to 3A and 3B

• 3A = Declarative knowledge

• 3B = Procedural knowledge

• Competence was a new addition and became Level 4 (shifting everything else up)
• Performance is now Level 5 (used to be Level 4)
• And Level 6 “population health” was renamed “community health”

So, here’s the new 7-level pyramid for CME outcomes measurements:

1. Participation
2. Satisfaction
3. Learning
3A = Declarative knowledge
3B = Procedural knowledge
4. Competence
5. Performance
6. Patient health
7. Community Health

Moore DE Jr, Green JS, Gallis HA. Achieving desired results and improved outcomes: integrating planning and assessment throughout learning activities.J Contin Educ Health Prof. 2009 Winter;29(1):1-15.