Author: Brian S McGowan, PhD

The Alliance Industry Summit (AIS) Educational Planning Committee of the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEhp) recognized the Strategies for Success as a PCMH program as 2016 Best in Class for Educational Outcomes. The award was accepted Monday, May 9th in Philadelphia along with our Partners from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (Bart Ecker; 3rd from the right) and Med-IQ (Jason Olivieri; middle).

The Strategies for Success as a PCMH program is an evergreen educational campaign designed and delivered by ArcheMedX, Med-IQ, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) to serve the needs of more than 11,000 NCQA-Recognized PCMH practices across the country. To date, nearly 400 practices from around the country have registered.

By designing an innovative team-based learning experience that brings the entire medical practice together online, the Strategies for Success as a PCMH program has established a framework to implement quality improvement education (QIE) at scale. Stated another way, this project has arisen from and is fully entwined within the quality culture and practice transformation of primary care practices. As such, the series of blended educational interventions and novel analytics approach have been designed to foster a QIE framework allowing us to seamlessly connect lifelong learning, quality improvement, and practice transformation.

Preliminary Findings:

In keeping with the Learning Actions Model –the underlying instructional design framework supporting the online components of the initiative – activity designers are tracking the specific actions that learners take while consuming content. For example, within the learning environment learners can take notes, set reminders, engage in team-based discussions, search through a collated library of NCQA tools and resources, as well as view, download, and recommend these resources within their team. Prior evidence suggests that the level of engagement within the Learning Actions Model is directly related to the effectiveness of the educational interventions. Data collected from the earliest 500+ learners have demonstrated that the content and team-based approach have easily surpassed existing benchmarks of engagement for 11 of the first 12 activities.

This high level of learner engagement is associated with material improvements in learning and competence.

On-going Research:

While the ultimate goal of this initiative is to support the unique needs of the care teams at each Recognized PCMH practice, of equal importance in the analysis will be investigating correlations between components within this initiative and secondary (immediate and sustained gains in knowledge and competence) and primary outcome targets. That is, in order to understand how this initiative may be associated with increases in outcome targets, we will consider the following hypotheses:

1. The number of registrants per practice team is correlated with increases in primary outcomes
2. The volume of interaction with the online curriculum (ie, learning actions) is correlated with knowledge/competence gains (both immediate and sustained) and /or increases in primary outcomes
3. Knowledge/competence gain is correlated with increased primary outcomes
4. Participation in specific clinical activities is associated with greater increases in intermediate and primary outcomes
5. High engagement with initiative activities is associated with greater magnitude of effect on secondary and primary outcomes than lower engagement (i.e., educational “dose effect”)

To learn more about the Strategies for Success as a PCMH program, please contact Bart Ecker at NCQA ([email protected]), Scott Weber at Med-IQ ([email protected]), or Brian McGowan at ArcheMedX ([email protected]).