Building Multidisciplinary, Disease-Focused Practitioner Communities with On-Demand Multimedia Tools and Education

Background: 

Busy clinicians have substantive demands on their time so when they want relevant, credible, and actionable answers to manage clinical challenges, they increasingly turn to a generation of on-demand, innovative, web-based resources that meet their needs. Additionally, in therapeutic categories where there is limited clinical evidence, there are rapid innovations, or there are substantial variations to therapeutic response by individual patients, the dissemination of the best-known expert practices or latest developments becomes critical to optimal patient treatment.

Program background:  MediCom Worldwide, an ACCME-accredited provider of integrated, medical education programs, has developed several proven-effective, practical, online community-building resources in therapeutic categories that are rapidly growing and where practitioners have dramatic need for education and tools to improve practice. These include Emerging Solutions in Pain (www.emergingsolutionsinpain.com) and Managing Myeloma (www.managingmyeloma.com), two initiatives that provide practitioners with peer-reviewed scientific and clinical evidence, validated tools, and perspectives of experts in multiple media to satisfy learning preferences. In this presentation, MediCom will share its expertise and experience understanding and meeting the changing information-seeking habits of practicing clinicians, highlighting actual examples and processes used to attract and retain a substantial percent of the targeted audience. MediCom will also address the use of emerging technologies that affect the quality, integrity, dissemination, and access of biomedical information. Finally, program processes from assessment to performance metrics will be addressed including:

• Defining practitioner target audience segments
• Assessment of information needs via primary and secondary research by segment
• Awareness building and site member recruitment activities
• Information delivery modalities/ media used
• Independent measures from launch to date of share of audience growth, and resource utilization
• Primary research related to site subscriber satisfaction and loyalty, program impact on professional practice.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  In accredited education, evaluation of learning activities is required. Extensive metrics are gathered and will be presented that measure quality, comprehension, and integration of information into clinical practice. Community membership by discipline and work setting are tracked and demonstrate rapid growth associated with specific outreach activities and retention of active participants. Independent website utilization metrics are also tracked year-over-year. Trends demonstrating steady and consistant growth in the following categories will be presented: Total Sessions, Page views, Hits, Bytes Transferred and Average Daily Sessions, Page views, Hits, Bytes Transferred, and Session Length

Conclusions:  When target audiences are carefully identified and their practice needs are rigorously assessed, it is possible to develop practical education and tools that are available on-demand and can be readily incorporated into patient care practices. When there is a limited clinical evidence base or if therapeutic innovations occur at a rapid pace, the repositories for resources become the focal point for communities of practitioners who regularly consume resources. It is possible that such peer-driven sites will become a substantial part of the new clinical information dissemination system.

Implications for research and/or practice:  The ability to successfully replicate the Emerging Solutions in Pain program model in a different therapeutic category, with different practitioners provides insight for the development of new therapeutic categories to apply these approaches to support clinician challenges in day-to-day practice.