>>McMAHON: Many years ago, information was the primary currency of education. We went to programs and talked to each other to get information. But now information is ubiquitous. It's on cell phones. It's all around us. They don't need to come together or go to programs to get information. What do we need to go to programs for? For active learning, for skills, programs that help us grow our ability to provide safe and effective care. What does that mean for the CME provider? It means moving away from episodes of education that deliver information in bite-size chunks. It means moving towards curricular approaches that are built towards specified skill development. What's another name for that? It's called mastery learning.

Mastery learning has three important principles. First, setting a very specific target. Through this program, you'll be able to build your skill in leadership, research principles in taking care of complex patients with heart failure, whatever the target is the specified skill. Number two, developing a curriculum that's modular and allows clinicians to achieve a variety of endpoints through the skill development process. And number three, waypoints that allow clinicians to self-assess how far they've come in developing those specified skills. To build a mastery learning approach rather than an information conveyance approach through your CME program, you will drive towards the quality and effectiveness of the education that creates the performance improvements that all of us are looking for.