A Case-Study: Using Data From Participant Evaluations
When the ACCME came out with the new Criteria (back in the 2000s!), many of us from  non-hospital-based organizations struggled to understand how to incorporate the concept of using data into our planning process. I remember whining a lot. “We’re a specialty society. We don’t have patient data!”  Not only that but, “we only see our attendees one time a year!”
Flash forward 7 years. The SAGES Continuing Medical Education Committee is pleased to announce the publication of the article entitled, “Evolution of practice gaps in gastrointestinal and endoscopic surgery: 2012 report from the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) Continuing Education Committee.” In this article, we describe the process by which we have collected data from our attendees through post-activity surveys, analyzed this data by “Learning Themes,” and then identified potential practice gaps which have or may be addressed at future educational activities.
If you have a subscription, you can access the article here:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00464-013-3263-2
I just read that some journal publishers are getting tougher about copyright violations, so message me if you would like me to send you a “draft” version of the paper. I’ll present a summary of this work during CMEPALOOZA, a web-conference being held March 20, 2014.
And congrats to my co-authors who did the bulk of the data work,
- John T. Paige, MD
- Timothy M. Farrell, MD
- Simon Bergman, MD
- Niazy Selim, MD
- Alan E. Harzman, MD
- Yumi Hori,
- Jason Levine,
- Daniel J. Scott, MD
Turns out specialty societies actually do have the ability to collect valuable data, and there are ways of using this data to, dare I say, improve the education delivered.