Introduction

Imagine a time in the not-too-distant past when patient care relied heavily upon scribbled notes on paper charts. The need for healthcare providers (HCPs) to keep up with the base of medical knowledge, which grew at a modest pace, was dependent upon a cottage industry of publishers, conference organizers and pharmaceutical companies as the group relied upon to disseminate clinical updates and emerging findings. The term “artificial intelligence” or “AI” was not part of our daily conversations, but rather was entertaining fodder for science fiction enthusiasts. 

That world, as we knew it, is gone. Today, a tidal wave of new medical knowledge and technology, advanced educational tools and systemic healthcare changes are reshaping medicine and forcing a fundamental reckoning within healthcare education.

Without further alignment to a tech-enabled environment, the healthcare education system, which had been heavily dependent upon a cognitive apprenticeship model (REF), will no longer be able to effectively keep pace with the explosion of medical knowledge and dramatic changes occurring in today’s new learner expectations. In a recent newsletter (December 2023), the American Medical Association (AMA) noted: “The current process of medical education across a clinician’s career is described as inefficient, inequitable and inflexible.”

To be sure, this reckoning is not without precedent.

Lew Miller, one of the founding figures of the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (Alliance), reminds us that the Alliance was started as a response to a prior reckoning of the healthcare system. On Dec. 12, 1974, 26 continuing education stakeholders convened in New York City with a clearly defined purpose — to seek solutions to widening learning gaps and systemic changes occurring in the field, and to make lifelong learning in healthcare more efficient and effective. The founders discussed the current condition of what was then referred to as CME (continuing medical education), looked at environmental problems and why they existed, and identified strategies to reach broad, but achievable, goals to move the enterprise forward. 

That necessary disruption was the genesis of the Alliance and here we are, nearly 50 years later, re-examining the future direction of healthcare education. We are ready once again to reimagine the essence of what clinician learning is and to explore how to best support and advance that process in an increasingly complex, rapidly changing and increasingly tech-enabled world.

When considering how to best position CE (the field, as it has now come to be known, which consists of continuing education for all healthcare professions) for a more relevant and optimized impactful role, we must recognize that while the evolving landscape offers opportunities, it clearly demands more attention and strategic focus. Now is the time for CE to leverage our deep professional expertise and institutional leadership to lead what should be considered a necessary disruption 2.0 in CE. We intend for this perspective piece to stand as a “call to action” for the Alliance community.

By embracing the need for immediate change, the Alliance community will be better able to leverage its unique position in the healthcare system and increase its ability to identify and address the clinical gaps and educational needs of CE learners. In so doing, they will be seen as a key contributive lever for change in the evolving healthcare landscape. To accomplish this, we must develop and advance intentional strategies to anticipate and address the future needs of healthcare professionals.

Image source linked here.

Lessons Learned From Prior ‘Necessary Disruptions’ in Healthcare

Twenty-five years ago, the Institute of Medicine (now known as the National Academy of Medicine) issued a landmark report entitled, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System”. This alarming report highlighted how U.S. healthcare was woefully behind other high-risk industries in terms of its attention to ensuring basic safety. 

Two years after the initial report, a follow-up entitled "Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century" (March, 2001) expanded on the earlier findings and shared even more disturbing news related to the uneven application and delays incorporating new knowledge generated by randomized controlled trials into practice. 

Three years later, yet another influential IOM report was released, "Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard for Care" (2004). This report emphasized the need for a cultural shift toward prioritizing safety and provided several strategies for making patient safety a core component of healthcare practice.

At the time, there was little debate over the glaring need for a call to action to address patient safety concerns. The need for change was strikingly clear. Yet, a practical question was evident: How does a complex system, such as healthcare, implement and sustain the changes that are needed? 

The necessary disruption to improve patient safety offered many lessons. A staged and persistent effort was required to spur action and gain traction following the initial call to action. The movement was enabled by subsequent initiatives and publications which prompted a deeper understanding and a more noticeable and dramatic cultural shift. These steps resulted in defined links to real-world clinical practice, and new measurement systems that ensured relevance to clinician performance and, ultimately, patient outcomes. In essence, those follow-up efforts served to fan the flame and generate more specific advancement strategies.

Building on this needed change, numerous presentations and publications subsequently pointed to the need for CE’s educational efforts to be more fully aligned with organizational priorities and quality improvement initiatives (ex. Dombroski, et al, 2021.

In this patient safety example, what made the subsequent reports meaningful was the structure they provided in terms of supporting systems, defined roles/responsibilities, policies, standards of care and reporting capabilities required to bring about measurable and sustainable change. These prior lessons are likely to prove invaluable for us to achieve the necessary disruption 2.0 in CE.

Major Shifts and Calls to Action

For purposes of empowering the Alliance community, we offer an overview of four major shifts that are rapidly disrupting clinician lifelong learning and healthcare education, the challenges these present to future learners and patients, and the corresponding calls to action for the Alliance community.

Major Shift No. 1: Rapid Change in an Evolving Healthcare Landscape: Increased Use of Educational Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Resulting in a Shifting Role of Clinicians

Clinicians today face a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape characterized by complex patient needs, personalized medicine and an ever-increasing volume of new scientific knowledge and technology. This evolution is fundamentally changing the role of the clinician and requiring new approaches to decision-making.

A study conducted in 2011 estimated that “the doubling time of medical knowledge in 1950 was 50 years; in 1980, 7 years; and in 2010, 3.5 years. In 2020 it was projected to be 0.2 years — just 73 days” (Densen, 2011). This shocking statistic highlights the critical need for new strategies for data review, distillation and interpretation, while requiring a heightened commitment by HCPs to lifelong learning. The impact this new learning environment has on the field of healthcare presents new challenges and opportunities for educators, as the learners’ needs continue to evolve.

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has presented a wealth of potential applications for educators and learners. Introduced in 1956, AI is now called one of the three leading technologies in the world (Dzobo & Adotey, 2020). 

CHALLENGES PRESENTED

• Clinicians must contend with the mind-boggling, exponential rate of advancement of medical knowledge and be willing to identify and leverage new resources and tools, while openly adopting effective strategies for learning.
• Clinicians are no longer professionals who simply acquire and apply medical knowledge, but rather someone who must navigate intricate care decisions, integrate emerging technologies, and provide personalized, patient-centered care. 
• Changes to the nature of the provider-patient relationships and conversations by shared-decision making and direct-to-consumer advertising. Healthcare professionals must be better equipped to effectively handle those discussions to work closely with patients and to deliver patient-centered care.
• There is a growing need for stakeholders to reach consensus on ethical issues and develop regulatory standards so that AI use policies are clear, and guardrails are in place.

CALL TO ACTION

• Embrace the nature of the evolving medical landscape and the continued rapid expansion of digital tools and personal health monitoring devices. Adopt an intense curiosity regarding the changes that are occurring in healthcare.
• Recognize the pressures faced by healthcare professionals and remember how CE can (and should) provide educational opportunities to help adjust to the new landscape, take in knowledge and integrate new decision-making tools into one holistic digital experience.
• Realize the main role of AI has been to assist physicians in improving their efficiency and accuracy. (Sun, et al., 2023)
• Accept the need to steadily explore emerging technologies and understand their application in medical education (especially with advancements in clinical specialty training and CE in radiology, diagnostics, surgery, cardiology and dentistry).
• Consider the development of new healthcare professionals who are both practitioners and informaticians, thereby harnessing AI’s potential, as advocated by Soleas, et al. (2024). Interdisciplinary collaboration, ongoing education and incentives are proposed to ensure healthcare and health services benefit from AI’s trajectory.
• Acknowledge a patient’s use of technology and personal health devices and monitors to support their health. Communication skills are critical when engaging with patients to interpret and discuss the use of these tools, as well as to improve patient adherence to patient-centered care plans.
• Identify, examine and routinely share real-life examples that advance a healthcare team/organization’s understanding of the use of educational technology and tools.
• Note the quality of research on “AI + medical education” is poor (Sun, et al., 2023), CE professionals need to take a disciplined approach to assess the results of different approaches and/or methods to contribute to our collective knowledge.
• As the field of combining AI with medicine/medical education steadily expands, CE must advocate for stakeholders to learn together and from each other, to reach consensus on ethical issues and to develop regulatory standards (Sun, et al., 2023). 

Major Shift No. 2: Establishing a “Science of Learning” Foundation: Pursue Opportunities to Evolve Educational Design to Integrate Broader View of Critical Reasoning, Behavioral Change, Knowledge Networks

Just as the environment is growing more complex, so are the many considerations related to educational design, metrics and measures of impact. There is a need to become more aware of the complexities related to learning science, clinical decision support and outcomes analysis. This approach should be adopted while adapting to changes in the systems of learning measurement, data capture and impact assessment. The focus must be on designing and delivering transformational educational strategies that CE professionals evaluate based on desired outcomes versus adhering solely to different outcomes levels.  

The adoption of new innovative educational design benefits from timelier (and more fluid) needs assessments and the subsequent development of individual learning pathways with more robust outcomes. There will need to be increased focus on how to think and not necessarily what to think.

More frequent performance feedback will aid the development of decision-making skills, and this can be accomplished by leveraging available educational technologies, real-world data and advanced analytics.

CHALLENGES PRESENTED

• Educational experiences must be aligned with organizational priorities and empower clinicians to think differently, learn faster, access and interpret available data, engage in learning designed to efficiently apply critical reasoning skills and recognize and appreciate the value (and limitations) of performance data. 
• Given the transformative nature of the learning environment, advancement will also require “unlearning” some lessons from the past. That translates into a need for a willingness to step out of our comfort zone.
• There remains a significant gap between what learners prefer (e.g., teaching style and delivery methods) and what actually works. For example, research related to the concept of desirable difficulties (Bjork & Bjork, 2020) indicates we need to rethink traditional CE planning and methods (McGowan, 2024).
• The optimal way to fill knowledge gaps is by studying and knowing some cognitive aspects to raise awareness of thinking mechanisms and deliver training to avoid cognitive errors (Corrao & Argano, 2022).
• Knowledge acquisition, if grounded in decision science, remains a key element that can build confidence in practice and support quality care (Ruggiero, et al., 2023).

CALL TO ACTION

• Accept the fact that to support the accelerated demands of healthcare, the educational experiences provided to clinicians must also evolve. There is a growing need for educational experiences that anticipate and address the demands of the evolving medical landscape. 
• Understanding and addressing the barriers to applying evidence-based medicine (EBM) in real clinical scenarios requires the integration of CME with implementation science, educational theories, cognitive psychology and information mastery (Setia, et al., 2024).
• Discover ways to explore the core elements of clinical reasoning (CR), which is the right way to facilitate decision-making from prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic points of view (Carrao & Argano, 2022).
• Remember the goal will be to equip clinicians with relevant knowledge, but also provide meaningful pathways for them to sharpen their ability to communicate with patients, seamlessly integrate new evidence into their practice, to think critically and act decisively in complex clinical situations.
• Realize that immersive learning is said to also be another form of a necessary disruption, as it draws upon real-life scenarios and facilitates quick feedback which translates into immediate learning (Villella-Canton, 2024).
• CR teaching and learning implies consideration of ambiguity and a focus on evaluating the process, not only the outcome, which might be challenging to apply in nonclinical learning contexts (Eva, 2004).
• Acknowledge there is a shift toward managing complex, individualized patient cases and there are technological tools that can augment the diagnostic process (sifting through vast amounts of data) and help propose treatment options for consideration and review (Villella-Canton, 2024).
• Rethink the traditional CE planning methods and training concepts introduced by Bjork & Bjork (1994), as learners may not fully appreciate the value of some designs that take them out of their comfort zone.
• Adopt educational strategies in CR curricula that focus on active and experiential learning approaches. Information gathering, diagnostics, treatment planning and students’ self-reflection are frequent aspects of CR teaching and can be used for outcomes to provide a deeper understanding of the learner experience. (Elven, et al., 2023).
• Be able to discuss what characteristics and workflow have allowed certain specialties to successfully adopt AI technology (e.g., deep learning works well with images for radiology).
• Review existing literature that offers ways to build on what we know and also adapt to the new medical education environment. As an example, Gellisch, et al, (2024) outlined a three-step digitization approach for blended learning which underscores the need to facilitate enhanced knowledge acquisition and foster a supportive emotional climate.
• Find ways to highlight the potential benefits of AI in healthcare, while advancing education and discussion forums designed to help ensure appropriate precautions are taken to address AI’s pressing safety, privacy, reliability and ethical considerations (HBR newsletter, James, 04/13/2023).
• Explore the critical role and evolution of measurement systems in assessing the impact of personalized continuous learning initiatives — expanding on the measurement and interpretation of educational outcomes (e.g., ongoing learning gaps relating to knowledge and application challenges at the individual learner and the system level).
• Advocate for data-driven approaches to evaluate learning outcomes and their direct influence on clinical practice. It is ideal to align with existing data capture systems and avoid presuming there is a need to institute labor-intensive parallel data collection efforts.

Major Shift No. 3: Leveraging Emerging Technologies to Deliver Trusted, Relevant, Personalized, Real-world Clinician Learning

There is no denying that educational technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to transform healthcare and disrupt the field of healthcare in significant ways. We are already seeing the applied use of AI in various CE programs today.

A shift toward more innovative, data-inspired, longitudinal educational experiences could certainly empower clinicians to excel in this new healthcare landscape, although it will rely upon proper orientation and training to the available structures and tools. 

We have an opportunity to explore the potential value of learning portfolios, as well as find ways to better incorporate reflective and longitudinal learning into programming to assess changes in performance and patient outcomes educational offerings.

There is value in examining how available educational tools and platforms can tailor education to individual clinician needs, helping them to stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing healthcare environment (e.g., podcasts, YouTube, etc.).

CHALLENGES PRESENTED

• Discussions about past and future practice raise complex and interesting issues, as the diagnostic ability of large language models (LLMs) is being tested. Many speakers/authors present conflicting views or cautionary tales related to the potential risks and benefits that may result (primarily) from an over-reliance on technology (Rodman, et al., 2024; James, 2023; Topol, 2019).
• Accept the potential for AI to reduce administrative burden and cognitive overload by automating some processes. However, bear in mind that offloading can be of concern since some of that cognitive work is necessary to train the learner’s brain to become a critically thinking clinician (Rodman interview, 2023).
• We are at the very beginning considerations of ethical AI development, continuous professional development for healthcare personnel and collaborative efforts to address challenges. This approach ensures AI's potential is fully harnessed, leading to a synergistic blend of technology and human care (Khalifa, 2022).

CALL TO ACTION

• CE professionals must help advance the development of innovative programs and quality improvement (QI) initiatives that facilitate rapid learning, empower learners, enhance their critical thinking skills, support the delivery of best-in-class care and treatments, and measure the impact.
• We must maintain a balanced view of the benefits and risks associated with the use of emerging technologies and AI. Topics include: the cognitive burden of the exponential growth of medical data, development of critical reasoning skills, impact on the physician-patient dynamic, administrative burden, “keyboard liberation”. 
• Adopt (whenever possible) a just-in-time, on-demand approach to educational content, consisting of easily accessed educational materials and reinforcement tools (e.g., include summary sheets, clinical decision guides, key pearls, etc.).
• Ensure the overarching principles that should drive precision education include relevance, accessibility, equity and inclusivity, fostering curiosity, cultivating collaboration and human-centered design are present. Key attributes involve assessment and training harmonized with physician workflow and learner-centered agency (assessments with the learner, not of the learner) (AMA, 2023).
• Become aware of and utilize case studies to demonstrate the successful application of AI in bridging educational content and clinical practice, while continuing to monitor the advances that AI is bringing to the ever-changing clinical and educational fields.
• Appreciate the value of models that rely upon real-world data, while noting that some models may perpetuate bias that exists and lend themselves to serious data privacy concerns.
• Realize that it is incumbent upon organizations to be proficient teaching HCPs how to use AI in effective and ethical ways. We need to advocate for their use in a coordinated and transparent fashion (Rodman interview, 2023).
• Spotlight the value of creating personalized learning pathways tailored to individual learner needs in place of just-in-case educational content. Also, be mindful when creating content of what stage of their career the learner is in. Personalized learning and leveraging technology can be different for a resident versus a late career practitioner. 
• Provide education that features the progress (and lessons learned) that has been noted by using AI for tasks related to diagnostics, data analysis and precision medicine (Harvard newsletter, James, 04/13/2023).
• Explore the abundant suggestions that exist for educators to use AI and other technologies. For example, in a Harvard newsletter (James, 04/13/2023), several specific strategies were listed: Leverage social media platforms to engage learners; utilize virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to offer immersive training experiences; create simulations for experiential learning; understand the value of blockchain technology; use generative AI (such as ChatGPT) wisely.
• Deliberately pursue opportunities for healthcare education (e.g., the Alliance 2025 Annual Conference) to expand your AI knowledge and competence which will serve to strengthen your future contributions to our community.

Major Shift No. 4: It Takes a Village: Creating Adaptive, Collaborative, Cross-disciplinary and Customizable Learning Frameworks

“Working together precedes winning together. Collaboration is multiplication.” —John C. Maxwell

It takes a village to deliver quality care to patients, and it also takes a village to design and deliver relevant, impactful, compliant education to the healthcare team to ensure those members of the team continue to possess and sharpen the necessary skills and competence to fulfill their role. 

Realize the need to build expertise across the healthcare team and adopt a more nimble, adaptive approach toward assessing and addressing individual, team and organizational educational gaps.

CHALLENGES PRESENTED

• While there are many players involved in the delivery of healthcare, there are also many other professional entities that support, guide and monitor the educational planning, accreditation and outcomes process. 
• As science has become more complex, roles have become even more specialized. The importance of healthcare team training has been emphasized over the recent past and a spirit of collaboration has emerged.
• The educational needs of the team are continually evolving and may differ for each team member.
• There are significant efforts required to effectively anticipate, address and evaluate the educational needs of healthcare team members on an ongoing basis. 
• When your job involves life and death situations in a clinical or hospital setting, you may not be as receptive to educational offerings that do not seem directly linked to the work you perform.
• Historically, regulatory requirements have been perceived as restrictive, but more recent efforts are being made to promote innovation through regulatory alignment (McMahon, 2018).

CALL TO ACTION

• Accept the need to form collaborations, curate content, and rely upon others’ expertise, while building upon CE’s experience in the educational planning and design space. It is wise to routinely assess whether it is better to “build or buy” the required skills and expertise.
• Embrace the need for innovative methodologies that support rapid learning and the development of critical thinking skills, enabling clinicians to provide the highest standard of care. 
• Build personalized and adaptive learning frameworks that prepare both educators and learners to respond to the ever-changing and dynamic demands of the healthcare industry.
• Pursue new ways to leverage AI tools to create more complex cases that are closely aligned with real-in-person visits with clinicians. 
• Aggressively explore, apply and leverage emerging technologies and interdisciplinary approaches to meet the evolving needs of providers and the healthcare sector.
• Identify collaborators who can round out the skills required in the new learning environment (e.g., data analysis, health informatics, population health, etc.) that may not be present in the core team.
• Consider how generative AI is catalyzing a paradigm shift in medical education. Make efforts to offer educational activities that can help make sure the use of AI is harnessed to elevate the skills and acumen of clinicians while also allowing them to connect more deeply with their humanity in patient encounters (Hswen, JAMA, 2023).
• Team up with others in the CE field to advance the knowledge of studies and use-cases related to the cost-effectiveness of AI (e.g., to improve diagnosis, facilitate screening, optimize laboratory tests and surgical appointments.) (Gomez Rossi, JAMA, 2022).
• Work jointly with regulators and the medical community to make sure AI developers identify and deploy solutions where they best improve outcomes (Gomez Rossi, JAMA, 2022).
• Promote planful discussions between educational bodies, regulatory agencies and major medical societies to identify opportunities to collaborate and/or align.
• Be mindful of an expanded list of activities that are credit-eligible to include: hybrid/blended learning, bedside case discussions, review of registry data, online case discussion using social media, procedural training using virtual reality, role-play simulation, interactive games (McMahon, 2018).
• Highlight the necessity of interdisciplinary education, which integrates behavioral change science and other relevant fields to support critical thinking and decision-making in clinical practice. 
• Accept the need for the integration of real-time updates in educational content to ensure clinicians remain at the forefront of medical practice.
• Realize that an even greater need for communication skills will result from the utilization of new designs and educational tools. (NEJM Group, Adam Rodman interview, 2024)

Closing

Unquestionably, the introduction of new technology and systemic healthcare changes has spawned an exciting, novel age in the delivery of healthcare. In tandem with that wave emerges an abundance of opportunities for CE to evolve as it is positioned to leverage its knowledge of learning science and to promote educational offerings that enhance the caliber of decision-making and ultimate quality of care being delivered to patients.

Traditionally, while there may be an eagerness to collect feedback and performance data from learners and patients, the stark reality was that a lack of technical expertise, analytical skills and time/resource constraints often made it impractical to extract in-depth meaning from the data. The new tools being made available bridge the gaps that previously existed, yet there is still some construction and required training to guide appropriate use for CE. CE brings much to the table, although it cannot do this work alone. We need to collaborate with others in the field to develop and implement deliberate strategies designed to routinely and systematically anticipate, adapt and act in a rapidly changing environment.

“Every positive change in your life starts with a clear, unequivocable decision that you are going to either do something or stop doing something.” —Brian Tracy 

Understandably, current CE practices vary widely across organizations. Resistance to change, as well as time and resource constraints, may have traditionally slowed the adoption of new and more effective educational technologies and outcomes measurement initiatives. Yet, going forward, to impact the quality of patient care, deliberate, intentional strategies simply must seek to rely upon real-world data, build learner’s critical thinking and analytical skills, and utilize technology to address relevant gaps in care.

This perspective paper issues a call to action for CE professionals to embrace the evolving field of CE and healthcare and to view the need for change as a necessary disruption. Change that is needed for the CE community to design, implement and evaluate more effective and efficient CE that meets the ever-changing needs of clinicians. 

How will you contribute to this necessary disruption in CE?

References and Additional Resources

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Ginny Jacobs, PhD, M.Ed., MLS, CHCP, FSACME, is the executive director of Quality Catalyst Group, LLC. As a scholarly practitioner, she applies her real-world experience to systematically help individuals and institutions define and achieve their performance improvement goals. She has extensive experience in organizational development, educational planning, human resources and quality improvement across a wide range of corporate and academic settings. She has successfully advanced organizational initiatives to include: workforce planning, mergers and acquisitions, organizational restructuring, development of onboarding programs and sustainable process and workflow redesign.

Ginny held leadership positions at the University of Minnesota within the Carlson Business School’s Executive Development Center and the continuing professional development (CPD) department within the Academic Health Center. She represented the business school in its partnership with the Mayo Clinic which involved the development of a business curriculum for healthcare executives. Her CPD work  involved advancing initiatives focused on joint accreditation, maintenance of certification and a partnership with the UM Health System’s quality improvement (QI) groups to design and develop an innovative cohort-based QI Collaborative.

Brain S. McGowan, PhD, FACEHP, is the co-founder and chief learning officer; ArcheMedX, Inc. He has served in leadership positions in numerous medical educational organizations and commercial supporters and is a fellow of the Alliance (FACEhp). He founded the Outcomes Standardization Project, launched and hosted the Alliance Podcast, and most recently launched and hosts the JCEHP Emerging Best Practices in CPD podcast. In 2012 he co-founded ArcheMedX, Inc, a healthcare informatics and e-learning company to apply his research in practice. You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) (@BrianSMcGowan), connect with him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his ReThink Learning Newsletter on Substack.

 

Nancy Paynter, MBA, is the principal at Connecting Humans in Health, LLC. She is a strategic adviser to the biopharma and educational provider sectors, providing guidance on the interplay of digital education, engagement and analytics across digital platforms. Her focus is on leveraging 25 plus years of direct commercialization experience at Pfizer, Genentech and Gilead to advance science-backed solutions that foster more humanistic approaches to clinician-patient decision making. Nancy currently heads up medical affairs strategy for PlatformQ, a leading digital provider of continuing education programming.

 

Jasleen K. Chahal, PhD, is the accreditation and outcomes manager at The France Foundation, where she is the lead compliance officer for all CME/CE programming. She also directs TFF’s outcomes program and collaborates with key stakeholders to design/implement CPD activities and quality improvement initiatives to improve CE, clinical practice and patient outcomes. Her work in CPD has been recognized nationally with awards for outstanding outcomes and outstanding educational collaborations. She has expertise in grant writing, survey design and outcomes, quality improvement, health services and evaluation research, project management, continuing professional development training and service learning.

 

John Ruggiero, PhD, MPA, CHCP, BCS, is an industry leader in biostatistics, outcomes research, education and behavioral and health economics. He has demonstrated leadership in real world evidence, quality improvement, implementation science and real world data capture, most recently at Daiichi Sankyo, and previously at Genentech. Currently John leads Daichi Sankyo's health economics, outcomes research, real world evidence and real world learning function with a focus on bridging the divide between evidence as it is applied in the real world (post-trials), learning, behavior change and real world data to forge a more integrated framework for advancing real world learning and collaboration.

 

Vince Loffredo, Ed.D., is the chief learning officer with the American Society of Anesthesiologists with over 25 years of experience working in higher education medical centers and continuing professional development (CPD). Vince specializes in content development and learner preferences, he is responsible for the development of accredited continuing medical education, medical publications, national conferences and meetings. Dr. Loffredo’s research centers on the evolution of leaner preferences and adult learning theory. His passion is leveraging the evolving artful use of technology and its application in CPD.

 

Audrie Tornow, CHCP, FACEHP, has over 20 years of experience in the CME realm. In that time, she was the proud recipient of the Brian P. Russell Exemplary CME Professional Award, Alliance Rising Star Award, a distinguished member and is now a proud fellow of the Alliance. She is also the former NAMEC president, Alliance mentor/mentee participant, Leadership Institute attendee, volunteer on the membership committee, annual conference planning committee and Almanac editorial board as well as ACCME surveyor, GlobalCME Impact Awards judge and Digital Health Award judge.

She currently is a fellow of the Alliance and juggles her family (including three teenagers) with marching band seamstress and scouting advancement chair duties and a day job as Excalibur Medical Education’s managing partner. In February 2024, she exchanged her seat on the Alliance Board of Directors for a spot on the Executive Committee and became the Alliance vice president.

Pam McFadden, FACEHP, FSACME, has over 30 years of experience in adult learning and instructional design of continuing education of health professionals, especially of physicians, nurses and pharmacists. Pam specializes in utilizing technology to enhance needs assessment, learning and content application, as well as developing innovative methods to assess the outcomes of continuing education activities. Pam is involved in the continuing professional development community, having served as past ptesident of SACME (2012). She is currently the president of the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEHP) and previously served as vice president for two years (2022-2023) and prior to that on the Board of Directors. 

Pam McFadden is known for incorporating adult learning principles and specific educational design criteria in the development and execution of continuing education courses for health professionals. She works directly with boards and committees for program development and ensures that all necessary resources are secured.

McFadden has successfully modeled and inspired a vision of present value and future direction for organizations she has worked for. She has set a strategic direction aligning with organizational priorities. She continues to analyze trends that may influence the CPD environment while articulating the big picture of continuing education. Her approach is from a system-thinking perspective to include the provider/patient keeping in mind the complex healthcare system and while developing the team needed to deliver optimal provider/patient education.