What’s on the horizon for continuing medical education? Insights from touchIME

Together, we discuss medical education from a global and US perspective, the impact of patient inclusivity, and the latest developments around educational outcomes, including Touch IME’s new outcomes model, Touch LPI.

Hannah, Matt, welcome to Vision Voices, from a very sunny Bolton this Friday

Hannah: Thanks for having us.

Matthew: Good to be here.

Nicky: It’s been such a busy start to the year. It’s nice to actually find some time to catch up with you.

So I know both of you traveled over to Orlando in January, which feels like forever ago now, for the Alliance annual conference. Hannah, how did you find the meeting?

Hannah: The meeting was brilliant. It was my first time attending the Alliance, and there were so many great sessions. I packed in as many as I could, and I sent Matt off to some that I couldn’t make myself.And I feel like I learned so much.

And on top of that, I got the chance to meet people who I’ve worked with, but I haven’t had the opportunity to meet in person and also make some new connections in the industry, which was just really brilliant, and I hope I can go back again next year.

Nicky: Sounds like a very worthwhile meeting. So, Matt, you came away with an award in the meeting, the CPD forty under forty. Can you tell us what that is?

Matthew: Yeah. I was nominated, had to fill out some sort of paperwork, my background CV, that sort of thing. And, yeah, I was one of, a fairly small group of, basically, future leaders within the CPD world. So it’s acknowledging the contribution we’ve made so far, and and, obviously, then I expect the hope is and, certainly, on my side, the hope is that that helps really cement my involvement with the CMU world, both US and international.

So, yeah, very, very, very privileged. It was nice to head up on stage. I think there was about eight hundred attendees this year.

So it was also my first time attending. We’ve, as a business, been before. We’ve presented before, but, yeah, as individuals, both Hannah and my first time. So, yeah, it’s nice to get up on stage and get some recognition. Good good for good networking. Good conversation starter.

Nicky: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, well done. It’s very well deserved. I’ve worked with you for eleven years now. Can you believe that?

Matthew: Yeah.

Nicky: But, yeah, it’s very well deserved. I’m not surprised.

Matthew: Thank you.

Nicky: So in today’s episode, we’re talking all about medical education and the latest developments and innovations.

And Touch as a company has been publishing content both in a journal on medical education for a US and a global audience for a long time. Thinking about medical education, what are the differences between the US and global?

Matthew: Yeah. I’ll jump in first there. So, you’re right. We’ve been educating or back in the print publication days, it was very separate, one for the US, one for Europe, but we’ve moved those into the digital world and made that a global journal with working with both US and international faculty.

And we’ve kind of taken that on into the IME space. So whilst pathophysiology doesn’t change, disease awareness doesn’t change, so education that includes the US and goes to a global audience makes sense in a lot of topics. There are some nuances, obviously, drug availability, treatment guidelines, etcetera. They can vary country by country.

So from our perspective, we are a global provider. We’ve got offices in the UK, in Europe, in America, and we do provide education in a truly global nature. So be that Europe the big markets, Europe and and the US, but also China, Japan, the Middle East, EMEA.

We have the ability to reach countries everywhere, and then we can either run broader global programs or more focused programs on one country. The big differences are, I think, in America, we’ll typically work with an accreditor through joint providership, and we’ll always include CME accreditation because that is almost a prerequisite.

Whereas in Europe, it’s still quite common to do industry sponsored education, so there’s less of a need.

IME is less common, so we do it a bit more piecemeal.

But, certainly, from an accreditation standpoint, we do offer we are a NEVAC certified accreditor, but it’s not always essential for education to be accredited, and we do both on the IME side.

Nicky: It’s good to be adaptable to different markets. So, Hannah, can you give us some insights of your experience working with US and global faculty?

Hannah: Yes. Absolutely. So we have a really experienced medical team who are involved in the delivery of our activities, and that includes some of the team based out of the US as well as in Europe.

Focused activity, we’ve really built some strong relationships with faculty in the US. And as you’ve mentioned with our history, we’ve also got a US editorial board and lots of partnerships with US societies so we can collaborate there as we need to as well.

And so working with US faculty is really an area we feel super comfortable in. I just wanted to share an example of how that’s been going this year. So in two thousand and twenty five so far, just our launches on our touchONCOLOGY platform. Over fifty percent of the faculty we’ve worked with have been based in the US.

Some of those were exclusively US focused activities, and some of those we were bringing in US faculty to do more global education.

And in the last twelve months, we’ve launched about thirty activities where the US is the primary audience for that activity, and we’ve really seen some fantastic outcomes, from those as well. And something I just wanted to highlight was that within a sample of those activities, over fifty percent of the participants said that they would change their practice as a result of participating.

So we can really see that we’re able to engage with the right faculty and really make a change in practice by doing so.

Thinking about global education, that is a little bit more challenging, particularly given that we want to deliver education that is really accessible to the busy health care professional target audience. So often, we’re looking at shorter enduring activities around thirty minutes and chapterizing that further into roughly ten minute chapters.

But we work really hard with the faculty that we do recruit to try and ensure it’s as applicable as possible to the target audience. We brief them really thoroughly, and we ask them to really highlight where they think something is globally relevant or perhaps where they’re talking about something more nuanced to their institution or their country.

That might be drug approvals or specific guidelines.

We also try to make the content more accessible in different regions. And, you know, Matt touched upon our capabilities in a whole host of different geographies, where we do things like provide translations to support that global education.

Nicky: Sounds like a great way of approaching faculty, and the outcomes figures are pretty fantastic. And we’re going to go on to outcomes a little bit more later on, so I’m excited to hear kind of the developments there.

So let’s talk about the role of the patient in CME, which I know is a really big topic at the moment.

I recently ran a survey with our editorial boards and faculty across the different touch therapy areas about the impact of patient inclusivity on CME. Around sixty percent of the people responding said that incorporating patient perspectives significantly improves the depth of learning for HCPs.

How do you think CME is evolving to become more patient inclusive, and what role do you think patient patient perspectives play in shaping medical education?

Matthew: So from my side, obviously, Hannah’s more involved once we’ve once we’ve had support for a grant, actually developing that grant. But from my side, patient centricity has been a buzzword for a long time, so it is something that is important. I think the industry has realized how important that is now. We’ve been working with patients for a long time, and one of the one of the phrases that really sticks home is, nothing about us without us, which is something that one of our patient advocates said a long time ago, and that really resonated with me.

But I think from my side and there was a thread at the Alliance on this. It’s still an important topic. I think that there were definitely other topics that dominated more so now, I think. But it has been around a long time, and I don’t think everyone’s doing it as well as they could be doing.

So to put it into context, patient centric is not even a word we really use anymore. We try to refer to it more as, I think, as you just said, Nicky, patient inclusive, but also patient led, because what we do is we’ll be working with patient advocacy groups, patient advocates, patients themselves or caregivers right from the outset. We’ll speak to them as part of our need assessment while we’re speaking to faculty, while we’re doing the literature analysis, while we’re looking at previous outcomes. And they’re really integral to the program itself rather than just tacking them in at the end, bolting them onto a panel discussion to just get a perspective.

So I think the concept has been around for a while, but how well people do it is still it’s a bit varied because from our perspective, it definitely has to be that partnership that partnership between the patient and the caregiver or the care team, which is that’s how you empower and cultivate that trust between that the the HCP and the the patient.

Nicky: In our survey, one of the key things that the people responding pointed out was that including patient perspectives and education helps HCPs to then go on and involve patients more in decision making around their own health. Hannah, what are your insights from someone who works directly on activities?

Hannah: Well, I’m really pleased to say that from the tenant therapy area platforms that we have, eight of them currently have live activities that incorporate a patient, a patient advocate, or a caregiver on the faculty for the activity. And there’s more in development, so I know that soon I’m going to be able to say that that’s the case across all of our ten platforms.

What this really showcases from our perspective is that it is possible to work with patients and patient advocates in different therapy areas from breast cancer to diabetes to Alzheimer’s disease.

And to give you that practical perspective, I just wanted to share some insights from a recent activity that I worked on. This was actually a touchMDT, so a multidisciplinary team focused activity on antibody-drug conjugates in metastatic breast cancer, really focusing in on the toxicity aspect of that. And we included an oncologist, an oncology nurse, an oncology pharmacist, and a patient advocate on our faculty for that. And as Matt said, that was always our intention from the outset as we were developing the proposal, looking into the educational gaps and the unmet needs.

It became clear to us that utilizing a patient would be really beneficial here because, you know, understanding what might happen when they start their treatment, making sure they know what to do if that happens, making sure that health care professionals are communicating that effectively, involving the patients in shared decision making was a really critical part of of that ident of that activity that we identified from the beginning. And, again, as Matt said, that patient advocate was involved right from the start, so they are a faculty. We talk about, you know, touchIME doing faculty-led activities, and we really mean whoever the faculty is.

We treat all of our faculty the same, so we involve them in our briefing calls. We share content with them for feedback throughout the activity development process.

And because I knew I was doing this podcast soon, I actually spoke to the faculty on this activity about what they really felt the benefits were of incorporating a patient advocate.

And for the health care professionals themselves, like you’ve mentioned, they do think that it really helps to encourage those communications with patients beyond the activity and to think more about shared decision making and practice and critically that the patient brings a different view. You know, they see things through a different lens to the health care professionals.

And by including them in the activity, we can really shine a light on that and share that with a broader audience.

And then from the patient perspective, again, they highlighted that the patients can have very different views from the health care professionals, and this can be really valuable. And it’s that lived experience that the patients or the advocates or the caregivers have, that can add additional content to the activities that can then be really beneficial for clinical practice and the outcomes for other patients as well. For example, in our breast cancer activity, the patient really shared the information that they wanted to know about side effects, when they were undergoing treatment and what sort of format they found it helpful, to receive that information in so they didn’t feel overwhelmed. So it’s that really practical, patient focused, practice relevant insights that can be added to an activity. And I don’t have the outcomes for the activity yet. It only launched earlier this week, but I’m really excited to see as I think they’ll be really strong.

Nicky: Oh, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I mean, it kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it, how important it is to include patients? In the survey that we did, one of the things we found out was that, actually, HCPs don’t come across patient perspectives as much as you would think, and most of them said that they rarely or never see patient perspectives in the CME that they’re accessing.

Matt, can you tell us a bit more about touchIME and your ongoing initiatives towards patient inclusivity?

Matthew: Yeah. I think Hannah spoke to it well. We’ve got a lot of great examples of successful programs that were largely as successful as they were thanks to the fact we had the patient voice.

We have launched some formats specifically to really be as patient centric as you can get. The MDT multidisciplinary team activity that Hannah mentioned, that’s a really nice example where even from the bottom up where you’re looking at the just the design of the activity, there’s a picture of the patient in the center. It’s completely about the patient. And it has been one of our sort of fastest growing, most popular formats arguably over the last few years.

So it’s nice to see that industry is putting money behind those types of proposals as well where they also see the value in their support in us to deliver that education.

So, yeah, the MDT, the touchCASES is another patient cases format, obviously, by nature it is patient centric. So whilst we try to bring patients in wherever we can, live symposia even, sometimes it’s not appropriate to have a patient up on stage. There’s obviously certain disease states where it just wouldn’t be appropriate. So we ran a symposium at the end of last year where we actually worked with a patient, interviewed a patient in advance. And as part of our sort of eye-catching animated video, at the beginning of the session, we had input from the patient there talking about their real life experiences, and that’s a really powerful way to start an activity and really grab attention. Because at the end of the day, that’s why doctors do what they do.

Nurses, pharmacists, etcetera, they’re there to support patients. So it’s definitely something that runs in our blood.

And even on your side, Nicky, on the Visionary Voices podcast, I know you had two of our experts, a a patient advocate and an expert physician on the in the world of asthma that that were faculty in a previous activity that then jumped on a podcast review to talk about the the patient perspective being a pillar of health care education. So I don’t know how long ago that was, but it’s definitely something that is important in all different facets of our company, isn’t it?

Nicky: Absolutely. Yes. It was in season one of Visionary Voices. We did a bonus episode, and I’ll include a link underneath this podcast if anyone wants to go back and listen to that one.

We can’t have a discussion about CME without talking about educational outcomes. They are obviously really important in allowing us to measure and understand the impact of an activity on HCPs and ultimately their patients.

In what ways is touchIME developing its approach to outcomes measurement?

Matthew: Yeah. You’re right. And I mean, in another world, you deliver the education, as long as you’re reaching the right people, that’s the most important thing. But, of course, when you’re getting support, you need to be able to prove that you have done what you said you would do. We’ve met the learning objectives. We’ve reached the doctors and the nurses and the pharmacists and the PCPs or whoever it is that we said we were gonna reach. So outcomes are incredibly important.

We’ve really taken the approach of starting with the end in mind, and a lot of that is what are the gaps that we want to address and what outcomes do we want to see, and then we work back from there as to how best to do that.

And that starts really from right at day one when we start thinking about what format would lend itself best to a topic. So it really is an integral part, and I think for us having been around since two thousand and five, we’ve got a lot of background of outcomes that we’re able to draw on. And to be honest, until the last year or so, and I think still across the industry, not outside of educational grants, it’s less familiar, but we all adhere to measuring the impact of the education against what’s called the Moore’s educational outcomes levels. So levels one to four are pretty standard where we’re measuring participation, so who’s engaged, satisfaction, fee that’s feedback on was the activity of the high standard, was it unbiased, etcetera.

And then you go into the more complicated measures of whether there were improvements in knowledge, were there improvements in competence.

We go to the core of course, we go a bit beyond that, which I think a lot of others do to measure sort of confidence levels, which is indication of self efficacy and indication of whether there are gonna be changes in behavior. And then we bring in both the quantitative but also the qualitative assessment. So we don’t just say, are you going to change your clinical practice? We say, what changes are you going to make? And that’s presented as part of the outcomes report. But I think the important thing is we’re moving away from that more linear model of have you what did you what percentage did you achieve in level one, two, three, four?

We still report that because it’s important, but I think the exciting thing for us, and there was a thread at Alliance here.

Brian McGowan did a fantastic session looking at analyzing all the data and, that they had over time with confidence based assessment, and how to use that to understand potential behavior change. So that’s something we’ve been taking on board for a while. And for us, we basically launched a new framework last year, which we feel is much more in tune with how adult learners learn nowadays in the digital age because these levels were originally sort of laid out in two thousand and nine, updated in twenty twelve. But the way that adult learners learn has changed a lot with the increase in the Internet and on online education, microlearning, etcetera. So we’ve launched a new approach to measuring outcomes, which we’re calling the LPI or the learner-to-patient impact, which isn’t linear.

It’s cyclical. It’s almost 3D cyclical. There’s feedback loops at all times, so we’re looking to make changes based on what we found. There’s more data points than we’ve ever had before. So really just trying to get to the bottom of what was the problem, did we address it, and then providing some actionable insight, so we can go ahead and then develop future programs, but also feeding that back to the supporter to give their medical teams that insight, which pharma are they really struggle to to get that level of information when they’re trying to do something themselves. So that’s a real benefit of the CME world is the level of detail we can get and share back.

Nicky: So the LPI model sounds like an exciting, new approach. Have you received any outcomes using this new model yet?

Matthew: We have piloted one activity. To be honest, the results were stunning.

It’s not like we weren’t getting the data from, in previous activities, but the way we’re pulling it all together now with a few more, different touch points that help feed into the bigger picture. And I think the reports flow better now as well because of scientific storytelling, which is something that we’ve done a lot for a long time in our activities. So the touchTALKS activity is a really nice example of that where we’re using animated graphics to break down and distill complicated data into something really easy to understand. And so Hannah can probably talk to this, but we spend a long time training faculty on how to deliver that in the best way.

So scientific storytelling has been in place for a long time in our activities, but we’re really, really focusing now within the LPI on that. So the the full circle of what what is the gap, how to best to address it, sending it out to the right people, getting them tested, and doing an assessment using statistically representative sample sizes, and then feeding all that data into how many patients are we likely impacting, what are the likely changes to clinical practice, and what are the future gaps which then feed into the next program.

Nicky: Hannah, what are your thoughts on this?

Hannah: I mean, Matt’s done a fantastic job of giving an update of where we are at the moment with outcomes, but I just want to reiterate how exciting it is at touchIME at the moment to be, you know, working on that LPI and starting to move over towards that for our outcomes.

I think it’s been widely acknowledged for a long time that the Moore’s framework is being used in a way that it wasn’t really set out to be used. And so starting to evolve how we look at our outcomes and, like Matt said, really, really think about the story, the journey that we’ve taken the learners on. What does that mean for our patients is incredibly important. I’m so excited to see that report continue to evolve.

The Alliance was full of great sessions about outcomes, and I think it’s an area that we’re always going to be learning and evolving. It’s not, you know, we’re not going to be suddenly doing everything perfectly tomorrow. We’re always going to be learning about how we can do things better and how we can improve. So it’s such an exciting area to think about.

Nicky: So we’re nearly at the end of this episode now, but I feel like we can’t leave without just touching on AI briefly. What impact do you think AI is having or is about to have on the medical education world?

Matthew: Yeah. I think we purposefully didn’t touch on this because we didn’t want to keep the audience here for an hour plus. Like, there’s a lot that could be said. Obviously, I’ve attended the European CME forum.

The Global Alliance for Medical Education just happened recently. The Alliance, it was in January.

It’s the number one topic that people are talking about, and I think that will continue for a long time. We actually did – Touch did – a webinar on this not long ago with Network Pharma.

What can I say in in in in less than a minute? It’s basically we are fully adopting it. We are not using it in areas where there are still concerns. So, obviously, copyright is a big, big concern.

We’re really using it as a tool to just maximize efficiency, and I think, Hannah’s sort of leading the charge, if you like, and working with the internal team on, is it a task force, Hannah, that you guys are running?

Hannah: Yeah. So we’ve set up our own internal team who are going to look after everything with AI within touch, and, obviously, that’s really important just to make sure that things are being used appropriately.

And I just want to touch upon the fact that the Alliance also has an AI task force, and they release a framework or they have released a framework, to help guide ethical and effective AI use.

And, again, it’s a little bit like outcomes. I think it’s something that’s going to continue evolving and something that we just need to stay up to date with. Our nominated team within touch will refer back to guidance and frameworks like that published by the Alliance so that we can make sure that everything we’re doing is aligned with current best practice.

And, obviously, that’s gonna keep changing as AI develops in the future.

Matthew: Yeah. I think as well,  there’s a bit of nervousness maybe a year or two ago within our team as to how that’s gonna impact the staff, but I think we’re all very much on the same page now that there is no replacement.

And I know everyone keeps saying this, so it’s to bang the same drum that it’s not going to replace us.

But the output the the opportunity to to increase output across all the different teams within our business, and, obviously, we have the promotional company within our group that do med comms work. We’ve got the publishing company. We’ve got our business, doing CME. Like, every group is using it, and it’s looking at ways to maximise efficiency. So I think the only thing that’s gonna change is we’ll be able to do more of what we do well, with that tool helping us to be more efficient.

Nicky: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. As a tool, it’s certainly useful. Well, thank you both for such a great discussion.

I look forward to hearing lots more about the new formats and strategies as they develop over the rest of the year.

Matthew: Awesome. Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Nicky..

Nicky: Thanks to our audience for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Visionary Voices on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Podbean.

Goodbye for now.