Continuing medical education (CME) plays a critical role in medical research and healthcare as it bridges the gap between academic research and clinical practice. It provides healthcare practitioners (HCPs) with well-balanced, real-world information that is disease-oriented and aligned to patient needs and global healthcare trends. Thus, it enables HCPs to improve their competency, address healthcare gaps in their field, translate innovations into practice, and enhance the quality of care patients receive. This article discusses current trends in Medical Education Landscape, development and its dissemination as well as how it can be made more effective. It also presents industry experts’ views on continuing medical education landscape and its future.*
According to the white paper, the portrait of the physician learner has changed dramatically. Physicians who graduated from medical school within the last decade are accustomed to using technology in their personal lives and also in their work to, for instance, communicate with patients and colleagues, to prescribe medications and order tests.
Increasingly, physicians are expecting the same types of experiences to enhance the continual learning they must pursue during their post-graduate medical education years. As such, the white paper cites the need to determine how to best harness and utilize the latest technologies to enhance both certified and non-certified professional medical education while preserving the integrity and high quality of information.
However, the need to transform how physicians learn beyond their medical school, internship, residency and fellowship training and into their 30+ years of active practice between graduation and retirement, receives far less attention.
The paper asserts that, “The practice of medicine, this clinical education gap and discrepancy for clinicians in practice needs to be addressed in order to maximize how patient care is truly managed in line with increasingly limited healthcare spending. Professional medical education is approaching an inflection point, and a dialogue regarding the future is urgently needed.”
A recent research article on the use of technology in medical education after the pandemic asserts a combination of face-to-face and technology-based learning will most likely characterize the future of medical education. It also predicts a greater use of emerging technology such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Over time we’ve seen a surge in advances in the types of innovation in online simulation and case studies consistent with the research predictions.
Case studies with online simulations designed to build skills as diverse as having difficult patient conversations to making complex diagnoses, are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with an eye toward making the simulation as near to real-life experience as possible. Case studies and clinical vignettes are effective tools in medical education and we can expect enhancements to keep learners engaged, offer real-time feedback, identify areas of weakness, and even foster some healthy competition with performance comparisons to colleagues and leaderboards.
