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Now Available: Inaugural Joint Accreditation Data Report: Scope and Diversity of Accredited Continuing Education for Healthcare Teams – 2018

July 18, 2019

First-Ever Joint Accreditation Report Shows Scope of Accredited Interprofessional Continuing Education

We’re delighted to announce the publication of the inaugural Joint Accreditation Data Report: Scope and Diversity of Accredited Continuing Education for Healthcare Teams2018.

The purpose of the report is to provide a comprehensive picture of the scope of the accredited interprofessional continuing education (IPCE) community, including the range of jointly accredited organizations, educational activities, and learners. At the Joint Accreditation Leadership Summits, we’ve identified promoting the benefits and value of Joint Accreditation and IPCE as a strategic goal. We published the Joint Accreditation Data Report as a service to the IPCE community and we encourage you to share it with your leadership and stakeholders, to show the scope, diversity, and capacity of accredited IPCE.

We thank the jointly accredited providers who submitted their data into the Joint Accreditation Program and Activity Reporting System (JA-PARS), making this report possible and creating the opportunity to present a more complete and in-depth picture of IPCE.

Key Takeaways Advancing Continuing Education by the Team, for the Team

  • In 2018, 75 jointly accredited providers offered close to 30,000 educational activities, comprising 144,000 hours of instruction.
  • A wide range of organization types are jointly accredited, including government and military organizations, hospitals and healthcare delivery systems, nonprofit membership organizations, publishing and education companies, schools of health sciences/ medicine, and others.
  • Providers report the number of learners at each activity; these numbers are referred to as interactions in the data report. Educational activities offered by jointly accredited providers included more than 15 million interactions with healthcare professionals.
  • Providers reported the most interactions with nurses (45%), followed by physicians (21%), pharmacists (10%) and pharmacy technicians (6%). Learner interactions with other professions made up 18% of total interactions. See more information about profession categories below.
  • The most common activity types were Internet enduring materials (49%), followed by courses (28%) and other types of enduring materials (12%).
  • The activity type with the most learner interactions was Internet enduring materials (68%), followed by other enduring materials (19%). Courses and regularly scheduled series each accounted for 5% of learner interactions.
  • Joint Accreditation Criteria require providers to design activities to effect change. Providers reported that 94% of continuing education activities were designed to change learners’ skills/strategy, 67% were designed to change learners’ performance, and 15% were designed to change patient outcomes.

We welcome your questions or feedback about this report. Please contact us at [email protected].