Including Patient Voices in Continuing Medical Education: One Provider’s Experience

ABSTRACT

In 2021, UpToDate began offering continuing medical education (CME) planned and delivered by patients. The patient-authored medical topic reviews focus on lessons learned from interactions with the healthcare system and emphasise quality of life for those living with specific conditions. Having access to the patient voice at the point of care provides clinicians with a perspective that can improve patient-provider communication and promote shared decision-making. Participants who viewed the patient-authored topics were emailed a survey about the content; several responses indicated that the new topics were useful in clinical practice. While positive responses demonstrate that clinicians value the patient perspective, we also received replies from participants and from the patient authors themselves indicating there is more work to be done in developing patient-led CME. As more patients are invited to join the conversation, their expertise will be increasingly recognised as integral to CME.

KEYWORDS:

• Continuing medical education
• continuing education
• patient voice
• patient engagement
• patient perspective
• patient involvement
• point-of-care education

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the patient authors who have written about their healthcare experiences in UpToDate, including Bruce D Rosenblum, who provided valuable feedback on this article; Janet Damaske, who worked on an earlier version of this article; and Denise Gilpin, Vice President of Content Editing, for her contributions and support of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).