Mission Statement

The purpose of Primary Care Education Consortium (PCEC) is to create, develop and implement practical, evidence-based educational interventions to the primary care community on optimal disease management strategies to enhance patient care outcomes. All PCEC developed CME activities adhere to ACCME’s definition of CME: to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance and relationships that a physician uses to provide services for patients, the public, or the profession. Several primary care associations collaborate with the Consortium in an effort to provide CME activities to physicians.

 

Content for all activities is designed to address the educational gaps identified in the needs assessment. Content is typically in the form of reviews and/or updates to clinical medicine on the therapeutic areas most commonly treated by primary care physicians. All content includes evidence-based clinical recommendations as well as desirable physician attributes, which are usually noted in an activity’s learning objectives. The intent of the learning objectives and content is to improve physicians’ knowledge, competence and/or performance as defined in the needs assessment. All PCEC developed content adheres to ACCME’s definition of appropriate CME content: knowledge and skills generally recognized and accepted by the profession as within the basic medical sciences, the discipline of clinical medicine, and the provision of health care to the public.

 

PCEC provides educational activities for a national audience of primary care physicians with clinical responsibilities, including family physicians, internal medicine physicians, osteopathic physicians and general practitioners. PCEC also recognizes that other allied medical professionals are also involved in providing treatment to patients in the primary care setting and as such, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and registered pharmacists constitute a secondary audience.

 

PCEC provides a range of activities that include: live symposia, Internet-based enduring materials, consensus roundtable publications, print CME and journal-based CME in peer-reviewed and indexed journals. The activity format is determined based on the type of educational gap revealed in the needs assessment (i.e. knowledge, competence and/or performance gap) and all activities include adult learning principles.

 

As a result of participating in a PCEC developed CME activity, we expect our physician learners to improve their knowledge, competence and/or performance in practice that lead to improvement in patient outcomes. PCEC strives for Moore levels three and four outcomes measurement, which measures change in physician learning (level three) and performance (level four) and consistently measures for improvements in knowledge and competence as a result of participating in the activity. Outcomes measurement activities are typically in the form of evaluations; pre and post tests; surveys; patient case vignettes and commitment to change (CTC) surveys. PCEC continues to research ways it may begin measuring level five (patient health) and level six (population health) outcomes in relation to its CME activities.