The relevance of the alliance for CME competencies for planning, organizing, and sustaining an interorganizational educational collaborative.

The heightened demand for accountability, access, and quality performance from health care professionals has resulted in linkages between continuing education (CE), performance improvement (PI), and outcomes. CE health professionals must also expand their skills and abilities to design, implement, and measure CE activities consistent with these new expectations. In addition to administrative and meeting-planning activities, new competencies associated with educational consultation and performance coaching are needed.

Commentary: Urgently needed: a safe place for self-assessment on the path to maintaining competence and improving performance.

Traditional continuing medical education (CME), necessary for keeping physicians current and competent, is insufficient in translating physician practice into better patient outcomes. CME, then, must be transformed from a system of episodic interventions to a more personalized, contextual, flexible, and targeted process within a continuing professional development framework. The core of this transformation must be a formal process of physician self-assessment.

The CME professional: challenges and opportunities in reforming CME.

A rationale for reforming and repositioning continuing medical education (CME) is featured in this article. As envisioned by the Conjoint Committee Report on CME and presented in other literature, the CME professional is defined, along with requisite CME professional competencies. Perspectives of CME professionals regarding the Maintenance of Certification program are presented, with a focus on requirements for physician self-assessment and lifelong learning and continuous practice improvement.

Attributes of an ideal continuing medical education institution identified through nominal group technique.

Introduction: Continuing medical education (CME) is an important resource physicians use to maintain their clinical competence. While many options for CME programs are available, there are few measures of their impact and few measures for physicians to use to systematically gauge their efforts in maintaining competence. This study initiates a process designed to identify key attributes of an ideal CME institution, defined as one that facilitates ways for individual physicians to maintain their competence.