Criterion 2 of the ACCME accreditation requirements ask that providers base their education on needs that underlie professional practice gaps. And as we know, the professional practice of physicians includes multiple domains, not just clinical care. But, it can include administrative medicine, educational medicine and research as part of what we do in our clinical practice. And our choice of words of professional practice was intentional — to give accredited providers and the learners the flexibility and access to a system that can support in all of those elements.
People who work at an academic medical center, a medical school, a medical society, and a health care institution at the local level have ranges of what they do in practice, that continuing medical education can support, that all fall within the definition of continuing medical education. Research, for example, there’s two elements to it. One is that research informs people about clinical medicine and about research enterprise. When one goes to an educational activity that is composed of research reports, one learns new knowledge about this domain and this area that can be incorporated into our thoughts about our clinical practice and our understanding of the direction and of the future, but it can also inform us as a researcher. But what are others doing and thinking as their approach to problem solving in this domain? So participating in a continuing medical education activity that is about closing our professional practice gaps or addressing our professional practice gaps in research methodology, or the approach to research, are critically important. As a young researcher or someone starting out in the research enterprise, we’re trying to formulate our approach. What tool are we going to use? What research method are we going to incorporate into our laboratory that we are going to use perhaps for decades as the basis of our inquiry? And we can learn that from going to accredited continuing medical education that is about research, that will teach us, even if it isn’t explicitly a course on research methodology. But it certainly could be a course on research methodology —that could be accredited in continuing medical education.
The same is as in administrative medicine. There are two ways to look at it—probably more than two ways—but let’s look at it in two ways. One, is that you can learn administrative skills. You can go to executive programs that develop your ability to manage physician community, their learning needs, help them do performance measures. You can learn quality improvement and learn to teach quality improvement. And these are part of your administrative skills. You can teach administration to people or you can give them an opportunity to learn while they are doing administrative medicine. And accredited continuing medical education can overlap with the administrative functions inside an entity. The process that people go through in committee work, for example — the committee work itself is not continuing medical education. But if people are working on a committee to analyze and determine for an institution what is the best device to buy or what is the best technological approach that that institution should use for the management of cancer, for example — the process includes going and learning about cancer, going and learning about the physics of devices and treatment of cancer, learning about the differences technologically between devices, and bringing that to bear in the development of a recommendation for what device the institution should buy. That process is completely analogous to learning from teaching. It’s completely analogous to a self-directed learning project that one could identify from a question in practice. And that’s administrative medicine that could receive or be included in the world of accredited continuing medical education.
So professional practice gaps are not just clinical medicine. Professional practice gaps include what you do in research, in teaching, and in administrative medicine.
