Planning CME activities for AMWC 2025

borrowed from the AAMS planning sheet for CME activities

Questions? please contact Jerry at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

name and title: please include your name as you would like to be introduced at the Congress and entered into any Congress materials.

When will the education take place: you can simply indicate, plenary session at 6IMCA or other session if appropriate.   

title or brief description for the education: a line or two is adequate.

What practice-based problem (gap) will this education address?:
This is like asking, "what problem are you trying to fix?", or "what do we need to do better?"   It might be to describe a new technique (it didn't exist before, and now we gotta learn it) or a medical statistic we would like to improve.

The Congress aims to improve connection, collaboration, cooperation, coordination.  This has been a challenge.  Many hurdles keep us from working together.  Devising protocols and tools to overcome these hurdles is already CME-worthy. Let's name these hurdles:

• Limited scope of healthcare stats in Armenia - where do we find this data?  How do we identify ongoing workers and projects?
• navigation of Ministry of Health, NIH
• navigation of projects supported by Diasporan groups
• access to funding
• fatalistic view that nothing changes
• language barriers
• our busy lifestyles
• concerns about corruption, siphoning of funds
• և այլն, և այլն

Next, presumably our networking and collaboration ought to serve some purpose, and those needs are endless:

• Cancer mortality, diagnosis, treatment
• Cardiovascular disease
• diabetes
• war-related injury and illness
• mental health (war, ethnic cleansing and just plain depression)
• Infant nutrition
• infectious diseases - TB, HCV, HIV, COVID

what is/are the reason(s) for the gap?  how are your learners involved?
There can be many approaches to a practice gap.  For example, if the practice-based problem is high rates of breast cancer mortality in Armenia, then the underlying reasons for that gap might include ignorance of screening techniques, lack of access to screening techniques, misinterpretation of results, poor mammogram reading by radiologists, inappropriate treatment by surgeons and oncologists, and so forth. Any/all of these are fair game for a CME activity.

Review the three statements to the right.:  The statements are listed below.  When one or more of these statements is checked, we don't need to collect a financial disclosure.  You can safely ignore them, as we are sending you a separate financial disclosure form which will inquire about financial ties to commercial interests (a.k.a. ineligible companies) over the past 24 months.*  

The education will… (check all that apply)

□  only address a non-clinical topic (e.g., leadership or communication skills training).

□  be for a learner group that is in control of the content (e.g., spontaneous case conversation among peers).

□  be a self-directed educational activity where the learner will control their educational goals and report on changes that resulted (e.g., learning from teaching, remediation, or a personal development plan).

 Even if you are delivering a non-clinical discussion, sign a disclosure anyway; the odds are that you will become part of a clinical discussion somewhere.

What change(s) in strategy, performance or patient care would you like this education help learners accomplish?   Presumably your presentation will improve physician competence, meaning that you will teach them how to do things differently. 

Think of it like this:    "As a result of this activity, the learners will:"

CME is intended to change physician behavior.  Increasing knowledge is not enough, unless that knowledge confers the ability to do something.  In this case, it is not only knowledge, but competence.

There are 4 levels of learning: knowledge, competence, performance and outcomes (K, C, P, O).  Improved knowledge, awareness, understanding are nice, but not adequate for CME credit in the USA.  As a minimum, we must teach competence.  

This is important:  If we plan our activities to improve C, P and/or O, then we should be prepared to document that those qualities were actually measured.  In other words, if we say we will improve performance or outcomes, then we had better measure performance / outcomes in order to see whether it was improved.  

CME activities should enhance physician competence, actual physician performance, or healthcare outcomes.  We want to list changes that we will actually measure, and typically will use evaluation forms where the audience attests that they have the ability to improve their practice.  (Again, improved knowledge/understanding is not sufficient.)

Measuring change in competence is easy.  Hand out evaluation forms or direct learners to a survey that lists the learning objectives, with the question, "did you gain ability to do these things as a result of the learning activity [yes/no] ?"  On one hand, this is easy to do, and it satisfies ACCME requirements for measuring change.  On the other hand, it is of limited usefulness, and not necessarily going to change healthcare in Armenia or anywhere else.

Discuss with learners the changes they intend to make to their strategies, performance, or patient care that will result from this activity and list that information to the right.
My understanding is that this will be collected from evaluation forms and added after the Congress. I will check with Hasmik.

Learning Objectives:  You can use the format, At the conclusion of this session, the participant should be able to:  ______

Do you consent to recording etc.

List three post-test multiple choice questions with answers - we'll likely use this for an online survey.  This is requested by AAMS, although many other CME programs do not require them. 

How long will this presentation be relevant?  This question is important if AAMS offers CME credit for watching the recorded presentations.  3 years is the max, but for rapidly changing topics, a shorter duration may be appropriate. 

Brief description of the presentation, 1-2 paragraphs self-explanatory, and I'm happy to help.

Thanks!  Cheers!

*for cases where there is a financial relationship with ineligible company/companies, we will work to mitigate the potential conflict of interest as described on this ACCME webpage