So there’s two parts to it. There’s the process of it and there’s the content of it. You go out and seek information, you find information, you interpret information that’s right in front of you. Your doctors tell you information through surveys that you give them or verbally at the end of meetings, through audience response systems, through evaluations. They give you information about what it is that they identify as professional practice gaps and what they identify as the knowledge, competence, performance issues, that underlie those gaps.
There’s other ways for you to get that as well. We want to see the other ways that you do it. We want to see the ways you do it, the process and the information that comes out of that. So if you use the literature, you provide us with a set of citations that says, this is our sources of information. In the old days that might have been compliant at ACCME. But, now, what we want to know is, what information did you get out of those sources, from those citations, from your reading, from your analysis and synthesis of that, what professional practice gap did they identify? Or, perhaps the citations were on the basis of a gap; they were trying to identify what information the physicians didn’t have or what their strategies were missing. And then you can use that in your needs assessment.
You can also use national data, performance data and performance measures that are at the national or state or community level. You show us the measure, you show us the tool—then you show us the information that is in that and what you got from that information. And that’s what ACCME is looking for, for verification of compliance with Criterion 2. You have a process in place that incorporates professional practice gaps, the identification of them, shows us what those gaps are, that you have gaps, that it’s worked to produce gaps, and that from that information you’ve been able to deduce needs that are either knowledge or competence or performance needs.
