Yu, Roger C

Health care information technology (IT) outages pose a threat to patient safety and patient care continuity. Organizations’ downtime plans must be updated regularly and staff at the work area level should have experience with implementing IT outage operations through downtime drills. This article describes the study institution’s IT Outage Toolkit, based on the acronym CLEAR, which guides the development of a downtime plan as well as design, execution, and assessment of work area downtime drills. Self-report and external audits of downtime drills help identify performance gaps and gaps in downtime plans.

BACKGROUNDThere is little research regarding characteristics of effective continuing medical education (CME) presentations in hospital medicine (HM). Therefore, we sought to identify associations between validated CME teaching effectiveness scores and characteristics of CME presentations in the field of HM.DESIGN/SETTINGThis was a cross‐sectional study of participants and didactic presentations from a national HM CME course in 2014.MEASUREMENTSParticipants provided CME teaching effectiveness (CMETE) ratings using an instrument with known validity evidence. Overall CMETE scores (5‐point scale: 1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree) were averaged for each presentation, and associations between scores and presentation characteristics were determined using the Kruskal‐Wallis test. The threshold for statistical significance was set at P < 0.05.RESULTSA total of 277 out of 368 participants (75.3%) completed evaluations for the 32 presentations. CMETE scores (mean [standard deviation]) were significantly associated with the use of audience response (4.64 [0.16]) versus no audience response (4.49 [0.16]; P = 0.01), longer presentations (≥30 minutes: 4.67 [0.13] vs <30 minutes: 4.51 [0.18]; P = 0.02), and larger number of slides (≥50: 4.66 [0.17] vs <50: 4.55 [0.17]; P = 0.04). There were no significant associations between CMETE scores and use of clinical cases, defined goals, or summary slides.CONCLUSIONSTo our knowledge, this is the first study regarding associations between validated teaching effectiveness scores and characteristics of effective CME presentations in HM. Our findings, which support previous research in other fields, indicate that CME presentations may be improved by increasing interactivity through the use of audience response systems and allowing longer presentations. Journal of Hospital Medicine 2015;10:569–573. © 2015 Society of Hospital Medicine