Baltimore, MD (PRWEB) September 24, 2014 -- The Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEhp) today issued a call for comments on its Quality Improvement Education (QIE) Roadmap – designed to closely align the continuous education of health professionals with improving quality of care for patients.
At the “Alliance Quality Symposium” in Baltimore, ACEhp presented its Roadmap initiative to leading health professionals in an effort to jump start a more systemic focus on education’s role in improving the quality of health care.
“With the US healthcare environment in the midst of a refocus on results and outcome metrics versus quantity of services delivered, we have a great opportunity to bridge divides and forge a collective responsibility for better results,” said ACEhp Board President Destry Sulkes, MD, MBA.
“This new era of continuing education for health professionals creates new collaborations among healthcare stakeholders who haven’t traditionally worked together,” added Lou Diamond, MBChB, QIE Chair, President of Quality in Health Care Advisory Group, LLC, and previously Professor of Medicine at Georgetown School of Medicine and Medical Director at Thomson Reuters.
In an article to be published in The Healthcare Blog this week, Sulkes urges health education professionals and the practitioners they train to focus broad healthcare continuing education where it matters most – the daily interactions among and between health care providers and patients.
With the input and work of several leading healthcare leaders, the Roadmap will delineate and provide an actionable vision for engaging the nation’s educators and emerging team- based practitioners in data-driven quality improvement with the integration of QI education tools, and techniques.
The Alliance has worked to:
• Identify within the continuing education industry and external thought leaders engagement to develop the specific aims, goals, and mission of the QIE strategic roadmap blueprint ;
• Gain multi-stakeholder endorsements for alignment on QIE standards, definitions, and means for educational activities in systems change; and
• Define standards and metrics to be collected for QIE projects across the nation in order to provide benchmarking and progress reports.
“Until recently, continuing education and broader healthcare professional development has been very successful in helping us maintain competence, licensure requirements and to learn about new and developing areas of their field,” Sulkes said. “Each profession and each medical specialty has outlined critically important updates in skills But we’re realizing we have had our heads down too far. We are missing the big picture. We can no longer afford continuing medical education that operates independently of other healthcare professionals, patients, and quality improvement efforts. Bringing ‘quality improvement’ and ‘continuing medical education’ together is our ‘Eureka’ moment in health care.”
This first phase of the QIE effort is funded through unrestricted independent grant from Genentech, Novo Nordisk Inc., and medical sponsorship from Astellas, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
Please find more information about the Quality Improvement Education Initiative and Roadmap online at http://www.acehp.org.
Contact: Mike Saxton, MEd, FACEHP, CCMEP, Interim Executive Director and CEO
Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions, 301-683-8118
MSaxton(at)acehp(dot)org
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About the Alliance and its Foundation
The Alliance is an international membership community of 2,200 professionals dedicated to accelerating excellence in health care performance through quality education, innovation, advocacy, and collaboration. Founded in 1975, the Alliance is the recognized leader and trusted partner striving to close gaps in health care delivery by translating the best science and knowledge into effective professional development. Alliance constituents and stakeholders include the broadest universe of medical and health care professions, including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, technologists, and technicians, among others. Members also include representatives from academic medical colleges, hospitals and health systems, medical specialty societies, medical education companies, government entities, and pharmaceutical and device companies.
Through the Foundation for CEhp (FCEhp), the Alliance is working to develop strategic relationships with national health care quality organizations to fund and use innovative research and leadership to shape future quality improvement and to achieve more inclusive, more data-driven, and more accountable CE across all health professions.
These activities serve the members of the Alliance and all healthcare education-related stakeholders through: Education Outcomes Research—in funded studies and collaborative, scalable applications that demonstrate practitioner performance improvement, lifelong learning, professional development, and measurable impact on competence, practice, and patient outcomes; Quality Improvement and Systems Change—through funded studies and collaborative inter-professional education (IPE) team-based research with scalable applications for improved performance within care- delivery systems and cross-functional quality improvement; and Healthcare Education Innovation—through the development and validation of innovative educational strategies, tools, and content related to the education of healthcare professionals. The governing Board of the FCEhp is led by elected officers of the Alliance for CEhp Board of Directors, joined by appointed directors representing healthcare professional education, healthcare quality organizations, health services researchers, and other related stakeholders of the healthcare system.
Tony Jewell, The Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEhp), http://www.acehp.org, +1 609-576-3800, [email protected]
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