Tips for Successful and Sustained Engagement in Educational Discussion Series

Context: Two years in to the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians in primary care practices are more experienced than ever with virtual technology, both utilizing it for patient care as well as continuing education and other informational resources. As national medical and professional associations continue to offer virtual educational opportunities, guidance is needed on how to make these offerings as impactful and useful as possible to leverage primary care practices’ new accessibility.

Objective: Describe observations and feedback from clinician participants of a longitudinal educational discussion series on Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) modeled after Project ECHO^® (Extension of Community Health Outcomes) to inform best practices for future educational discussion series.

Study Design: Open-ended evaluation questions administered in qualitative interviews of participants in a longitudinal OUD educational session.

Setting: 6 primary care practices across the U.S. participated in the live, online OUD educational series; hosted by the AAFP National Research Network.

Population Studied: 5-10 individual participants who participated in the educational series.

Intervention/Instrument: A qualitative interview guide.

Outcome Measures: Participant insight on creating high value, engaging educational discussion series programming.

Results: Features of educational discussion series that mattered most to participants, obstacles they faced in their work environments that inhibited participation or engagement and suggestions to mitigate these, as well as factors that encouraged them to engage in discussions.

Conclusions: As more educational and support programming is offered virtually to primary care clinicians, insight is needed to tailor these offerings to their audience to create high-value, high impact programs that meet primary care clinicians’ educational or resource needs.