Our Practices

Our Program considers a range of healthcare factors. We work with physicians in managed care organizations, academic institutions, group private practice, solo private practice, and governmental entities. While we assess individual factors that affect the specific audiences within each activity, we are also cognizant of more general forces of change that apply to all of our potential learners.

For our overall Program, we consider the following healthcare environmental factors(1):

• The practice environment, which includes the immediate environment of the physician and his/her patients;
  
• The larger involvement with physician colleagues in the practice and in the community;
  
• The community itself, from which both the physicians and the patients come, which carries with it its own expectations.

Within each of these environmental segments, there exist a number of factors that affect a physician's need for education and his/her application of education to the practice of medicine. These concerns from the changing healthcare environment are considered within our educational Program:

• Changes in demographics and the patterns of diseases
  
• Increasing patient empowerment and autonomy
  
• Immense increase in the volume of literature facing physicians
  
• Rapid introduction of new technologies
  
• Changes in healthcare delivery options
  
• More demanding patients
  
• Increasing concern for escalating medical costs
  
• Increasing attention paid to healthcare quality and
  outcomes.(2)

We base our Program and its activities on the following precepts (2):

• We must provide learning opportunities that are educationally effective in relation to health outcomes.
  
• We must be responsive to the rapid changes in the world and in the healthcare arena, and offer educational opportunities that assist physicians with the same goal.
  
• Our Program and its activities should encourage and allow self-directed learning.
  
• We must encourage interprofessional learning.
  
• Our Program must be founded on proven effective educational processes.
  
• We must include behavioral changes in our desired results, in addition to knowledge transfer.

1. Davis DA, Fox RS. The Physician as Learner: Linking Research to Practice. Chicago, Ill: American Medical Association; 1994.

2. Towle A. Continuing medical education: changes in health care and continuing medical education for the 21st century. BMJ. 1998;316:301-304.

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