Outcomes measurement is essential to the educational process. How will you know if your activity makes a difference or help change clinician behavior or patient health outcomes? Every activity receiving Category 1 credit must be evaluated. Outcomes-based evaluation or measurement looks at impacts/benefits/changes to your attendees (as result of your educational activity) during and/or after their participation in your activity.
The following items must be components of any evaluation process.
- Participants must be requested to evaluate activity presentations and content in terms of stated practice gaps (need) and learning objectives. All feedback, written and verbal, should be assessed to determine if objectives were met.
- Participants must be requested to evaluate commercial bias in the delivery of educational content. Sample questions are available upon request.
- If the activity seeks to change physician competence: participants must be requested to describe their learning process and their intent to change their behavior or practice in terms of knowledge, skills, and/or attitude; or change in knowledge must be objectively measured.
If the activity seeks to change physician performance: participants must be requested to describe or objectively measure the changes they have made to their practice or list reasons (barriers) to implementing change.
If the activity seeks to change patient health outcomes: patient health data must be measured objectively before and after the educational intervention.
In order to measure change, status must be measured or described both before and after the educational intervention has been issued. This can be accomplished through the use of various tools and formats. Samples of outcomes-based evaluation tools and formats are available from the CME upon request.
A typed, substantive summary of the evaluation responses and outcomes measures must be provided to the CME office. The summary, in combination with the organizing committee and activity director(s) own feedback, should be used to make recommendations for future programming.