This is the third in a series of articles profiling the committees of the ACR.
One of the primary services that the ACR provides to members, and to rheumatologists and rheumatology health professionals in general, is ongoing education. Many of the meetings you attend, the resources to help you prepare for exams, and the products you use to learn (or teach) new knowledge come from the ACR Committee on Education.
Rosalind Ramsey-Goldman, MD, DrPH, professor in the division of rheumatology at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago became the chair of the Committee on Education at the 2006 Annual Scientific Meeting. “My pedigree for that is that I was chair of the professional meetings subcommittee for two years, and previously a member of that subcommittee,” she says. “As the subcommittee chair, I participated in the Committee on Education meetings.”
The mission of the committee is simple but essential to ACR and its members: “The Committee on Education plans educational activities,” explains Dr. Ramsey-Goldman. In fact, the Committee on Education has so many responsibilities that it includes four busy subcommittees to ensure everything gets done. Because the committee’s major activity is the annual meeting, there is a planning subcommittee for the meeting, she notes. The Professional Meetings Committee and the Continuous Professional Development Committee plan all other activities, and the Audiovisual Aids Subcommittee manages the ACR’s image collection.
Annual Meeting Planning Committee
The most obvious – and perhaps largest – task that the Committee on Education is faced with is the annual meeting.
Planning for the Annual Scientific Meeting starts before the previous one has ended. Right after the meeting, “a pre-planning meeting is held to review the meeting that just occurred,” says Dr. Ramsey-Goldman. The Annual Meeting Planning Committee plans the meeting in December and presents the tentative program to the Committee on Education in January. This review ensures the varied interests of meeting attendees will be represented and that the program complies with ACCME criteria. Typically, the majority of the meeting is developed and approved by the end of January.
In order for the meeting to be relevant, the subcommittee members must be representative of the specialty. “We have a mix of people from clinical, research, and practice,” explains Dr. Ramsey-Goldman. “You participate in the committee to represent the constituency you come from, and bring with you ideas for important content. This is one of the ways that we identify the content to include in the meeting.”
The current Annual Meeting Planning Committee chair is Brian F. Mandell, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “We recognize that the ACR membership is incredibly broad based, and we try to offer something for everyone,” he says. “That includes basic researchers, translational or clinical researchers, clinicians, educators, trainees, and administrative clinicians. The meeting is an opportunity to hear the latest advances and current trends in each of these areas.”
The annual meeting is typically packed with choices of educational sessions, allowing members with specific interests to focus on those areas. “The annual meeting includes new science that has not yet been published, areas based on needs assessment data we think [members] need education on, cases to be discussed, and ‘Meet the Professor’ sessions,” Dr. Ramsey-Goldman states. “There are also workshops with hands-on education, whether it’s practice with joint injection, learning new technologies on a PDA, or looking at joint fluid under a microscope.”
The Annual Meeting Planning Committee has made a conscious choice to provide more educational options during this year’s meeting. “We realize that there may be conflicts for some individuals who have to choose [between concurrent sessions offered], but we decided to push toward more alternatives,” says Dr. Mandell.
One way to learn from every session is to access some after the meeting. “We will offer some sessions electronically after the meeting and have recordings of some sessions available to view during the meeting,” says Dr. Mandell.
Meetings Committee
A separate subcommittee is devoted to planning a multitude of other ACR educational meetings, including the Winter Rheumatology Symposium; the State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in Chicago each April; Innovative Therapies, which cover the latest developments in treatments; and special programs for pediatrics, including the Pediatric Rheumatology Review Course and – new for 2008 – the ACR Keystone Pediatric Rheumatology Symposium.
Although the Professional Meetings Committee oversees all these activities, “it does not necessarily plan them,” says Dr. Ramsey-Goldman. Planning groups with expertise in the relevant areas develop the individual programs.
Professional Meetings Committee chair Robert C. Fuhlbrigge, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, explains: “Each of these smaller meetings has grown in its own right to become significant. Each has evolved to meet members’ needs.”
Professional Development
This committee has “developed modules of educational content for credits toward recertification, and also for practice improvement,” says Dr. Ramsey-Goldman. “These were created from scratch, and are available online.”
The chair of the Continuous Professional Development Committee (CPD) is Audrey B. Uknis, MD, associate professor of medicine at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
“We’re responsible for developing programs and products that interface with the American Board of Internal Medicine’s [ABIM’s] Maintenance of Certification [MOC] program,” explains Dr. Uknis. “These programs have multiple cross-purposes; they allow ACR members to get MOC credits, and they meet the needs of the education committee itself by providing information on what’s needed in continuous education.”
She adds that her committee’s work has been “a real multidisciplinary effort on the part of the ACR to meet the needs of members who are involved in practice or education, and keep everyone current; meet their CME needs, recertification needs, and training needs; and disseminate quality-of-care standards.”
A new product from the CPD debuted in March of this year: a practice improvement module (PIM) called Assess, Improve, Measure (AIM).
“This is a continuous quality-improvement program where we’ll examine practice habits with respect to specific guidelines so a practice can see how well it adheres to those guidelines,” says Dr. Uknis. AIM is a Web-based data-collection tool that generates a report telling the practitioner how often things were done. “The practitioner can then determine how to do things better, whether it’s incorporating a reminder to do something, using a new form for patients to fill out, or finding a new way to schedule or communicate,” explains Dr. Uknis. “The practice has 14 days to enter data from 25 patient records. Once they get their report, they have six months to make any changes, and then they re-survey the patient data to see how they’re doing.”
At that point, the program is officially complete, but the same practice can repeat AIM, with the same guidelines or different ones. “The guidelines topic for 2006 is rheumatoid arthritis,” says Dr. Uknis. Next year, the ACR will release a PIM on gout. Practices that want to repeat AIM can build on their existing data.
“Eventually, this data will be benchmarked for practices around the country and you can see how your practice measures up to similar practices,” says Dr. Uknis.
The CPD is also responsible for the Board Re-Certification Course, a case-based topic review using cases provided by ABIM. “Participants will get a clear view of what types of cases and topics the ABIM is interested in,” says Dr. Uknis. “Participants get ABIM MOC and CME credits for the course.”
Another CPD product is ABIM Learning Sessions, which are six-hour, case-based courses. “They’re based on 60 questions provided by ABIM, which provide recertification ‘knowledge points’ that participants can acquire, with the assistance of very knowledgeable faculty,” says Dr. Uknis. This is presented prior to the Annual Scientific Meeting in the fall.
The CPD also handles ACR’s self-assessment program, Continuous Assessment Review and Evaluation (CARE). “It’s Web-based, consists of 60 ABIM-type self-assessment questions, and provides educational links to assist in reviewing the question topics and finding the answers,” explains Dr. Uknis. Features include “treatment guidelines, arthritis and rheumatism literature, and up-to-date links. Participants can get ABIM and CME credit for this.”
Audiovisual Aids Subcommittee
The Committee on Education also encompasses a subcommittee devoted to audiovisual learning aids. Terry M. Wolpaw, MD, associate professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, is the Audiovisual Aids Subcommittee chair.
“Our goal, predominantly and almost exclusively, focuses on the image collection,” she explains. “It’s a repository of rigorously peer-reviewed images of common diseases as well as rare manifestation of diseases. It includes radiology and clinical images. It’s used to teach students across the entire spectrum, from medical students to practicing rheumatologists.”
The subcommittee holds a call for submissions every year, and each time they receive approximately 200 image submissions. From these, the subcommittee selects the best overall image, and first- and second-place images in each category.
Of the remaining selections, the subcommittee may choose anywhere from 50 to 75 to add to the image collection. “The second phase of our work is for committee members to write captions for those, which are also peer-reviewed,” explains Dr. Wolpaw. “The collection grows every year.”
Dr. Wolpaw adds that in the future, the collection will be available online. “We recognize how people learn and how people teach – mostly they use their computers,” she says. “We want to keep the collection user-friendly and accessible. It will be much more dynamic, and not limited to static images.”
With all of these educational options, there is something to meet the needs of rheumatologists and health professionals in all types of practices, labs, and institutions.
Jane Jerrard is writing the series on ACR committees.