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Rare Diseases Are Our Focus, Expertise, and Passion

CheckRare CE is committed to providing education that raises awareness of rare diseases and enhances participant competence and patient outcomes.

Our Mission is to improve patient outcomes through awareness and education.

Purpose 

The purpose of our educational programs are to:

• Raise awareness of rare diseases to health care professionals
• Provide free and accessible education opportunities to health care professionals and the rare disease community
• Improve health and patient care through quality evidence-based educational activities
• Advance physician competence as clinicians, educators and researchers
• Provide physicians the opportunity to earn Category 1 credits needed to meet continuing medical education (CME) requirements
• Collaborate with leading medical centers and physician caregivers to implement CME activities aimed at improving patient care

About CheckRare

CheckRare is a leading publisher and web platform focused on rare conditions. We produce original content in the form of articles, videos, and podcasts that reach over 100,000 health care providers each month. Our peer-to-peer perspectives and in-depth interviews provide physicians and the rare disease community with up-to-date and reliable information.

As the leading rare disease publisher, CheckRare has worked with thousands of content providers, including leading physician and rare disease experts, medical centers, centers of excellence, advocates, and patients. We have the largest library of peer-to-peer video content focused on rare diseases. Physicians and patients regularly engage in their content for rare disease news, insight, and clinical perspectives.

We use our reach into the rare disease community to better understand the practice gaps of our users and to build educational programs that address these gaps.

As rare disease publishers, we have insight into the challenges that rare diseases present. Although there are over 10,000 rare diseases that cover many disease categories, there are some common themes that CheckRare’s platform addresses. Common educational needs and/or challenges faced by rare disease physicians, patients, and caregivers include:

• Patients and experts are few and geographically scattered
• Limited information is available
• For many rare diseases, multiple physician specialists are required to manage the patient
• Existing resources are not easily accessible to the different specialties that manage patients with rare condition
• Typical search strategies can be ineffective

CheckRare CE’s educational programs are designed to address these challenges and educational needs. Healthcare professionals engage in their educational programs to get unbiased, data-focused information that will help their practice.

Why CME?

Continuing medical education (CME) programs plays an important role in the delivery of innovative health care to patients. The rapid pace of scientific discovery and innovation increases the need for CME to communicate advances to medical practitioners and patients. Our accredited, unbiased, independent educational programs are typically underwritten by pharmaceutical and life sciences companies that recognize the value in broadening awareness of disease states, standards of care and new therapies.

• CME facilitates innovation and improves patient outcomes.
• CME programs are recognized as an essential part of continued professional development for physicians. and a key resource in ensuring both the quality and effectiveness of health care delivery.
• Medical education is important for health care quality and patient access that many states mandate.
• CME is part of physician licensing requirements.

Accreditation

Our educational activities are planned and implemented in accordance with the essential areas and policies of the Joint Accreditation (which includes ACCME).

Faculty Educators

Our faculty educators include physicians, researchers, nurses, genetic counselors, patients, and caregivers. To serve in the role of faculty educator on CheckRare CE programs, individuals must have professional or personal experience in the rare diseases they are speaking to. Selection criteria includes the following:

• Clinical expertise/real world experience
• Expertise as educators and experience with adult education methodologies
• Knowledge of the scientific literature
• Expertise on the needs of the target audience
• Evaluations from past educational activities
• Diversity of background, including age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, and socioeconomic status

Commercial Supporters will have no input or role into the identification or selection of faculty educator(s) or planners.

Conflict of Interest Identification and Resolution

Our CME providers obtains all relevant disclosures and document processes implemented to mitigate all conflicts of interest regarding any faculty or person who has the ability to affect content. They adopt the following policy for all educational activities that they certify for continuing education:

• Any person involved with the planning and delivery of a CME/CE activity, and who has an opportunity to affect the content is required to submit a Disclosure of Financial Relationships Form to the Academy, prior to any content development. This includes, but is not limited to, all moderators, faculty/writers/editors, joint providing organization’s staff, and/or planning committee members.
• This disclosure must be received by the Academy prior to final confirmation of participation either as a planner or as faculty/author. If any person refuses to disclose, they will be disqualified from further participation and cannot have control of, or responsibility for, the development, management, presentation, or evaluation of the CME/CE activity.

Our CME providers, upon receipt of each Disclosure Form, shall review and determine if a conflict of interest is present utilizing the Mitigation of Conflicts of Interest Algorithm. If a conflict is perceived, the CME provider must document whatever method is used to mitigate the conflict of interest. Methods of accepted mitigation strategies include:

• Divesting of Relationship: The person having the conflict documents to the Academy that they have divested themselves of the relationship (i.e., consultant, advisory board member, promotional speaker, and such).
• In-house Review: A member of the accreditor’s clinical staff will review presentation slides, abstracts, and any other education/handout materials for appropriate references, level of evidence, fair-balance, and non-commercial interest. Also approved is the use of scientific abstracts or freestanding papers or articles that have previously been peer reviewed or judged against predetermined criteria to ensure the data supports the conclusions before they are accepted for presentation or publication.
• Peer Review: Validation by a content reviewer who has the experience to review the materials and evaluate for clinical relevance, level(s) of evidence, conclusions and document the presentation(s) is/are fair balanced, non-biased, and practice recommendations are evidence based.

If a conflict cannot be mitigated either by divesting the relationship or by the review process, the person identified may not be allowed to present clinical recommendations but may present other data or information. Regardless of the method used, there must be documentation of what conflict of interest was identified and the method used to mitigate it.

Validation of Content

The planning, implementation and compliance oversight of the education initiative will be the responsibility of our CME provider, who will utilize a Planning Committee consisting of the Faculty Educators, an instructional design expert, a clinical director, and a reviewer for the initiative. The Planning Committee will review all content materials developed prior to their use in this initiative.

All recommendations for patient care in accredited continuing education must be based on current science, evidence, and clinical reasoning, while giving a fair and balanced view of diagnostic and therapeutic options.

All scientific research referred to, reported, or used in accredited education in support or justification of a patient care recommendation must conform to the generally accepted standards of experimental design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation.

Outcome Measures and Educational Effectiveness

Our outcomes plan is designed to measure Moore’s levels 1 through 5 and will consist of the following components:

• Insight into who is accessing the material gleaned from audience generation tools (i.e. profession, specialty, etc.)
• Pre-activity survey (3-5 questions) prior to starting the activity to assess learner experience with the disease and their knowledge on key concepts
• Post-activity test and evaluation survey to assess: (1) Learners’ knowledge of key concepts after participation; (2) Achievement of activity learning objectives, fair balance, and usefulness and relevance of the education to clinical practice of learners, and whether learners believed their knowledge of this area had improved; and (3) Practice change via learners’ self-reported intention to change practice behavior.
• Follow-up survey to all learners to determine impacts on practice.

Outcomes reporting and analytics increases and optimizes the impact of investments made in continuing education. Good outcomes reporting:

• Measures the impact of programs scientifically
• Isolates the segments of the learning population that benefit the most and least
• Examines planned and actual practice changes
• Determines barriers and enablers of learning transfer in the health care environment, and
• Measures improvement in patient and community health.

Stakeholders in continuing education can use good outcomes reporting to:

• Verify positive impact of individual educational initiatives.
• Locate opportunities for targeting programs to health care professionals most likely to benefit
• Generate new content and new programs when barriers and gaps to improvement are identified
• Better describe the patient and health care populations and understand correlations between factors affecting health care.

Outcomes reporting is judged on three key criteria. Outcomes reporting must be:

• The measures must be important to the health care community and patient health and must reflect the learning objectives.
• Outcomes data provides intelligence to guide future educational initiatives. This intelligence should provide demographic data on the intended audience, reveal barriers to successful treatment, and identify underserved populations.
• The report must be clear, free of bias, and show consistency between different techniques of measurement and types of data.

Contact

If you have an idea for a CME program or if you want to learn more about our learning platform, please contact our Education Director, James Radke, PhD:  [email protected]

Rare Diseases Are Our Focus

We are the only publisher and learning platform focused exclusively on rare diseases and rare cancers. We bring physicians and patients the best science, research, and clinical practice information and present it in understandable and clinically useful formats that inform health care delivery and improve patient outcomes.

Rare Diseases Are Our Passion

If you have an idea for a CME program or if you want to learn more about our learning platform, please contact our Education Director, James Radke, PhD:  [email protected]