Better Ways to Handle Community Educators
In an academic setting, particularly in the faculty affairs offices within medical schools, a lot goes into managing the appointments and data of their community educators. That’s why having a software application solution like SmartPath is essential for managing your community educators.
Medical education programs that lead to Medical Doctor (MD) degrees in the United States and Canada are accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), according to the LCME website. “LCME accreditation is a voluntary, peer-reviewed process of quality assurance that determines whether the medical education program meets established standards.”
In some instances, medical schools may not own their hospitals or may need to provide a private practice experience for their students. In these cases, the schools have to go out into the community and operate through a local hospital or physician’s private practices. For example, Oakland University works in partnership with Beaumont Health as its operating hospital to teach medical students and Central Michigan University College of Medicine also works with several community physicians’ private practices.
When they use a community hospital or private practices, in order to be an LCME-accredited medical school, anyone who teaches one of your medical students, or fellows, has to have an appointment with the medical school, so that they can be vetted, to ensure they meet the qualifications of the medical school and LCME.
In the past, a lot of these community educators did not have appointments with the academic medical schools. Now it is something that is reviewed during the LCME accreditation process.
Medical schools have difficulty appointing and tracking their community educators. The complex appointment process and tracking the status of these appointments is not easy. So much goes into managing these appointments that something needs to be done to simplify these processes. This is where an application like SmartPath comes into play for simplifying the appointing and tracking of your community educators.
The roster functionality allows the faculty affairs office or the faculty member to input an educator’s information, teaching sites, credentials, etc., so they can be easily appointed and tracked. The application can also be used for additional workflows such as appointment renews and faculty evaluations, continuing to make maintaining appointments easy for both the faculty member and the Office of Faculty Affairs. It is also essential to keep records up to date. To do this the medical schools need to make it simple for the community educators to be able to log into the application and upload documents that are needed for appointment, such as a CV, medical licensure, board certification, etc.
Mountain Pass Solutions’ SmartPath application is the ideal solution for optimizing these workflow processes and for making the tracking of your community educators or any of your faculty appointments. SmartPath makes the processes simple for both the faculty members and your faculty affairs team! Get more info about SmartPath and see how it can help you with your LCME accreditation and simplifying the work for everyone involved!
Our Buying Guide was written to help you evaluate a potential faculty information system purchase. If you have not downloaded it, please do. It’s informed from our team’s combined experience working in faculty affairs and with faculty affairs departments.
Deb Komorowski is the Vice President, Client Relations for Mountain Pass Solutions.
With over 40 years of experience leading workflow optimizations and human resources departments in higher education, Deb brings extensive knowledge in faculty position management to the Mountain Pass team. Using her expertise, Deb leads the charge to improve workflow efficiencies to save institutions time and money.
