How physicians and other healthcare professionals learn has important implications for how they ultimately practice and how they treat their patients. By incorporating patients into the learning experience for health professionals, the project team seeks to create patient-centered education and inspire greater patient-centered care.

The team wishes to advance the engagement of patients as educational partners in the continuing professional development of physicians and other health professionals by advocating for routine inclusion of patients and their voice in continuing medical education (CME), teaching accredited CME providers how to effectively engage patients' voices and values in CME planning and delivery, and using educational programming to help physicians and team members learn the value of listening to patients and involving them as decision makers.

The objectives for the proposed “Learning Together” initiative are to recruit exemplar education teams that have demonstrated an ability to model collaborative planning and implementation of patient-engaged CME, solicit best practices to be shared at the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) 2019 Annual Meeting, and disseminate these insights via lasting educational tools and resources.

Activities will include a virtual poster session and sharing of best practices at ACCME 2019, publishing a distillation of best practices in a white paper, and creation of online educational resources that CME professionals, patients, and other educational stakeholders can use to improve engagement of patients as educational partners in their institutions.

The greatest impact the team hopes to achieve is to see a greater number of CME providers achieving ACCME’s accreditation expectations for engaging patients in the planning and delivery of CME—a new voluntary requirement for Accreditation with Commendation.

With the development of the “Learning Together” initiative, the team aims to model the inclusion of patients as partners in education. Patients who demonstrate best-practice approaches in leading and informing CME will participate in planning and implementing each programmatic aspect from the identification of educational best practices to the educational sessions for the “Learning Together” track at the ACCME 2019 Meeting to the distillation and dissemination of best-practice insights to the CME community following the meeting.