Imagine you’re a practitioner who wants to return to practice after an extended leave and need to brush up your clinical skills. Or you’re a hospital who wants to welcome that practitioner back, but you need evidence of current competency. In both cases, a physician reentry program can be the ideal partner.
Physician reentry programs are structured educational plans that may offer a mix of clinical and cognitive refreshers for individuals returning from maternity leave, sabbaticals, or other extended absences.
Who’s running these programs? One player in the field is The Center for Personalized Education for Physicians (CPEP) based in Denver. Although CPEP’s program is similar to other programs, each reentry program is unique, and hospitals need to research each program individually to determine which one best suits the needs of its medical staff members.
CPEP uses two distinct methods to help practitioners with their reentry needs. “First of all, we do an initial needs analysis or an assessment of what the physician’s educational needs are within the context of what their proposed practice setting will be,” says Elizabeth Grace, MD, medical director at CPEP. Then, CPEP determines whether the practitioner is ready to return to practice unassisted, or whether he or she needs to participate in an educational program.
The educational program is the second part of CPEP’s technique to help practitioners with their reentry needs.
“The educational portion of the reentry plan is designed so the physician can accomplish that education in their home location [while being] guided, directed, and monitored by CPEP,” says Grace.
Why should a medical staff use formal reentry programs such as CPEP to assess a practitioner’s needs and design an educational program rather than using internal resources? Grace says that CPEP has more experience providing these services than the average medical staff does.
“It gives [practitioners] the context of knowing what the educational needs are, and also, since we have a lot of experience assisting physicians through the educational processes, we make pretty specific educational recommendations,” Grace says.
Nevertheless, medical staffs may want to consider how many of their practitioners are eligible for reentry programs and whether the numbers are high enough to warrant the creation of an internal reentry program. Alternately, several medical staffs may consider joining together to form such a program.
CPEP keeps a close watch over practitioners in its programs. The practitioners submit materials outlining what practice activities and procedures they are performing. Once a month, CPEP discusses the practitioner’s activities and their outcomes, if applicable, with the practitioner.
Also on a monthly basis, the mentor submits written reports to CPEP about the practitioner’s progress.
“Every three or four months we [send] a written report both to the client and to the referring organization,” says Anna Wegleitner, MD, associate medical director at CPEP. “If somebody’s only in a four-month reentry plan, it might be that the final summary report is their [only] report.”
If the referring organization is a hospital with a credentials committee, these reports contain valuable competency data that the committee can use to evaluate the practitioner’s progress and eligibility for graduating from the reentry program and taking a more active role on the medical staff.
Grace says these reports are one of the benefits medical staffs receive when working with a program such as CPEP rather than doing the legwork themselves. “[It’s] really important for a hospital credentialing office to feel like they understand how things are going and where they are for the physician without having to do the legwork themselves,” she says.
Wegleitner says it’s important for medical staffs to receive evidence showing a practitioner’s competency rather than a non-detailed verdict from an outside reentry program stating that the practitioner is ready to hold the requested privileges. “If I were a medical executive committee leader, I certainly wouldn’t trust that,” she says about the generic report.