Introduction
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare practitioners (HCPs) across medical disciplines have been increasingly reliant on web-based education. Simultaneously, recently in medicine, perhaps nothing has changed as rapidly as our understanding of COVID-19 — including, but not limited to, its biology, epidemiology, risk factors, prevention, and management. For this reason, it is challenging to fit COVID-19 education into the traditional mold of generating web-based content that is available for credit for one or more years.
As healthcare educators, we are used to updating content prior to expiration to reflect an important guideline change or new FDA approval. Yet with COVID-19-related education, often the education is outdated within only months or weeks of posting. And this could happen multiple times within the year. As an accredited medical education provider, Vindico sought to develop a method of updating content that was:
- Fast and did not require laborious and duplicative efforts by provider or learner.
- Accurate and led by faculty experts.
- Able to be universally applied across COVID-19-related CE activities, creating a single resource for all COVID-19-related content updates.
Our Approach
At Vindico, we had planned to post 10 COVID-19-related CE activities between October 2021 and June 2022. It was important for us that we be able to not only update the content for new learners, but also for those who had already participated in the education. Moreover, given that most COVID-19 education draws a multispecialty and interprofessional audience, we wanted to eliminate the need for learners who had participated in multiple activities to receive redundant content updates.
In collaboration with our faculty, we decided that regardless of the differences in content sets and target audiences, any COVID-19-related content updates would be applicable for all our activities in development. To this end, we created a universal content update page, Covid19CE.com, to house all COVID-19-related updates. This website is updated quarterly with transcripts generated via expert interviews regarding any relevant advances to COVID-19 understanding, epidemiology, risk, and/or treatment. Importantly, all learners who had previously participated in any Vindico-provided COVID-19 activity are emailed a link to this website when content is added, and the content of each current activity is updated to direct future learners to this page. In doing so, all learners, past and future, have access to these changes.
The specific challenges that were overcome by creating a universal website to house all COVID-19 updates as well as the resulting benefits are outlined in the below table.
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Problem
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Resulting Challenge
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Solution
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COVID-19 information rapidly changing
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Content is outdated within weeks/months of posting
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- Amend all activities with one universal update posted to Covid19CE.com
- Direct all previous learners to single update
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HCPs need COVID-19 education, primarily web-based, given the uncertainty of the pandemic
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Vindico had 10+ activities in need of updating
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HCPs are inundated with emails
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HCPs suffer email fatigue and may miss important updates
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- Learners receive only one email, regardless of how many activities they engaged with
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Resulting Improvements and Benefits
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- A fast and accurate method to update content
- Reduced burden on educational provider and distribution partner (eliminates need to update individual activities multiple times)
- A comprehensive website with quarterly updates for all HCPs — a one-stop shop!
- Fewer emails sent to HCPs (and a staggering open rate of 4%!)
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In executing our new approach, we have learned the following lessons:
- While an automated email marketing system is not required to execute this design, it simplifies the process and ensures that learners do not receive duplicate emails.
- Having a single faculty champion for this initiative has shortened timelines for the recording and posting of content updates. At the discretion of our faculty champion, additional faculty were recruited to ensure accuracy and delivery of content by the leading experts.
- While text-based updates are not the only possible format to transfer knowledge, we selected this format for convenience in accordance with feedback from our learners.
Importantly, Vindico plans to sustain this model of updating COVID-19-related content until the expiration of all current and future activities. Moreover, this universal design for content updates is something that Vindico may consider for other therapeutic areas in which we do a lot of education, and the field is evolving rapidly.
Conclusion
In the rapidly evolving world of COVID-19, we, as healthcare educators, must be able to rapidly adapt and alert learners of important updated information. Even traditional models of content updates are too slow and laborious to accommodate the volume and frequency of these updates. The approach presented here instead provides a model to provide timely and accurate content updates to previous and future learners, without burdening the learner or the education provider.
Katie Robinson, PhD, CHCP, is the senior director, outcomes and analytics, for Vindico Medical Education.