Grant: Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: Health Services and Policy Research

This proposal is a response to the Listening for Direction III theme of "Quality and Patient Safety". Continuing Medical Education (CME) is one of the most powerful quality improvement tools available to the health care system. Appropriately designed CME has been shown to have a modest to moderate positive effect on physician practice behaviour and patient outcomes; no other type of intervention targeting physicians has the same compelling evidence base. A recent meta-analysis found that online learning was as effective as traditional face-to-face programs in influencing practice. As in face-to-face CME, the way in which scientifically valid and relevant content is presented in online CME programs influences participant uptake and implementation. While there is a sound understanding of what constitutes good quality in face-to-face settings, criteria by which to evaluate the quality of online CME have not been defined. This project is intended to bring clinicians-educators and decision-makers together and, by using Modified Nominal Group technique, create a list of quality indicators for online CME. Given the very rapid growth in the use of e-learning, in order to ensure it has a positive system-level impact on health care, these quality characteristics must be defined. This is of interest, not simply to medical educators and practitioners, but also to the many government departments and agencies (for example, Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada) who have clinically important information about which they wish to educate physicians.