CS2day Initiative Selected as Winner of CME Alliance Award
March 11, 2009
West Des Moines, Iowa - The nine Cease Smoking Today (CS2day) partners, including IFMC, received ACME's 2009 Award for Collaboration in CME at the Alliance's annual conference January 28-31, 2009 in San Francisco. The award recognizes innovation in education through building collaborations to provide high quality CME initiatives. The partners received plaques and a check for $2,500, which will be put back into the project.
Other partners taking part in the initiative include: the California Academy of Family Physicians, CME Enterprise, Healthcare Performance Consulting, Interstate Postgraduate Medical Association, Physician’s Institute for Excellence in Medicine, the Purdue University School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Virginia School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The CS2day partnership provides a new framework for collaboration in continuing medical education. The initiative brought together partners to develop 175 activities to deliver education to more than 50,000 physicians, pharmacists and health care professionals through live meetings, materials and innovative performance improvement projects.
This is the first initiative bringing together CME professionals around a single public health initiative – reducing the number of smokers in the U.S., while increasing knowledge of treatment options, improving counseling skills and providing tools for health care professionals.
“IFMC was chosen to be a partner in the initiative because of our vast knowledge and expertise in information technology, clinical performance measurement and quality improvement,” says Mike Speight, senior director of operations for IFMC. “We are a member of the project steering committee and have worked diligently with the other partners to design a focused quality improvement program.”
Program Overview
Key components of the CS2day initiative include performance improvement projects, a data warehouse to track learning outcomes across activities, an online toolkit to promote individual and system-level changes and a software application for hand-held devises to assist clinicians who promote smoking cessation.
The program will provide physicians and health care professionals with effective and clinically relevant strategies for increasing the smoking quit rates for patients in their practice.
IFMC’s Role
For the CS2day initiative, IFMC provides CareMeasures™, an electronic patient registry used in a health care provider’s office setting, and a clinical data warehouse of information submitted by physician practices participating in the project.
With the CareMeasures tool, providers will be able to securely track and report patient data. The tool also allows providers to pinpoint improvement areas within the practice and will alert them when clinical standards have not been met. For this initiative, a new clinical module specific to the CS2day initiative to record patient information and progression with smoking cessation has been added to the existing CareMeasures tool.
In addition, IFMC serves as the lead organization for one of the four performance improvement projects included in the CS2day initiative.