Is it Enough to Just Learn the Blueprint Topics?
or·thog·o·nal
/ôrˈTHäɡənl/
adjective
- Of or involving right angles; at right angles.
- STATISTICS
(of variates) statistically independent.
When we call CurrentMD Cardiology a “Lifelong Learning Platform,” what do we mean by that? Turns out, it’s not just another marketing slogan.
To us, it means creating products that meet the needs and interests of our physician learners. And not just your need to master the basics of disease X or Y, but your desire to meet each patient where they are so that you can provide true healing.
Is this patient not just a CAD patient but also a cancer survivor? What do I need to consider? Are they a victim of a health disparity? Is there an opportunity for preventing disease that I’m not being mindful of? Maybe this patient is just elderly and in need of some extra consideration regarding polypharmacy?
Your medical board exam might require you to memorize the different types of myocardial infarction, and we can help you do that. But what you want every day is to feel competent, conscientious, and on the ball, and that’s where we provide more than the rest.
We’ve partnered with experts in information architecture and adult learning and done over two years of research to understand the real needs of our learners. Here’s one thing we discovered: While virtually all CME products organize learning materials according to a taxonomy of disease states, physicians often describe their interests in other ways.
The industry standard for CME is to organize topics according to disease state. We do that too. But then layered on top of that are myriad other factors that come into play when there is an actual patient in front of you–the orthogonal categories seen below.
Health disparities, social determinants of health, end-of-life care, patient safety, and ethics are all practical realities that need to be considered in order for care to be appropriate and holistic.
We’ve worked on tying the two together so that when you come looking for information that will be meaningful to you, you can easily find it.
Your need for lifelong learning needs to accommodate and align with those orthogonal categories in order to be relevant and truly meaningful.
Not only is our content ever mindful of the numerous factors physicians want to understand beyond disease state, but our efforts have driven improvements in our user interface using tagging and enhanced navigation structure to inform “cross-cutting” topics as a mechanism for making content more discoverable and digestible.
What does this mean practically speaking? We create and organize our content thinking how you as a physician think when seeing patients, not just how the medical board thinks when creating a test. We provide hooks into content that doesn’t depend on knowing a disease state. We make sure that when you’re looking for something specific, we serve it up.
CurrentMD Cardiology isn’t just another CME course or another online textbook, or even a way to rack up those CME credits, it’s a “lifelong learning platform” for you and for your patients.