Project Background:

There were two driving forces that lead to a groundswell of momentum and support coming out of the AIS meeting this past spring. First, in conversations building off the morning's keynote and in the midst of a session by Wendy Cerenzia & Greg Salinas entitled, "Standardization of Outcomes: Lessons Learned from Attempts to Aggregate" - we hatched the idea of an outcomes standardization project (OSP).  While these conversations were energizing, shortly thereafter the Regeneron team (including Karyn Ruiz-Cordell) presented a session entitled, the "The Tower of Babel: Enough Already, Can We Please Speak the Same Language?" and the groundswell rapidly grew. In the weeks that followed a plan of action was devised by an initial Outcomes Standardization Project (OSP) Steering Team that relies fully on volunteer energies, galvanized around a passion to solve the following (draft) problem statement:

“The community struggles to effectively understand and communicate the value of CE in part BECAUSE the community lacks a standardized outcomes language and a set of standardized approaches to measuring a result, effectively comparing and aggregating outcomes data and insights remains impossible.”

We believe that this problem statement can be read through three lenses:

  1. professionals who design and build educational interventions for healthcare providers (HCPs) need this standardization to effectively measure the impact of their efforts;
  2. research scientists need this standardization to effectively advance our branch of educational research; and
  3. professionals who provide commercial support need this standardization to effectively understand the impact of their grant funding and to advocate for larger grant-making budgets.