A new, interactive clinical decision-making program will soon arrive by e-mail to APA members and subscribers of Focus: The Journal of Lifelong Learning, APA's clinical CME journal. Clinical eFocus is a brief e-mail and Web-based educational activity developed to help psychiatrists review their clinical decision-making skills.
Clinical eFocus features a clinical vignette in the form of an interactive e-mail that will enable recipients to choose what they believe is the best treatment for the patient in the vignette and also to see what treatments have been endorsed by other psychiatrists responding to the vignette.
“Clinical eFocus is an exciting, new opportunity for APA to offer its members continuing education that is easy to use during their busy days,” Deborah Hales, M.D., told Psychiatric News. Hales is director of APA's Division of Education and a co-editor of Focus.
The patient vignettes appearing in each Clinical eFocus will address a clinical theme featured in the previous issue of Focus, which is published on a quarterly basis to help psychiatrists stay abreast of advances in the field.
Each interactive e-mail will provide a link to a corresponding Focus article pertaining to the clinical topic.
“We hope that eFocus will provide us an opportunity to use the enormous power of the Internet to both collect and disseminate information,” Thomas Kramer, M.D., an associate editor of Clinical eFocus told Psychiatric News.
He explained that developing a way to enable practicing psychiatrists to see what their peers would do in the management of a particular case will give them “a sense of how their thinking compares to that of other practitioners.”
Kramer, who wrote a Clinical eFocus vignette about a patient with symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder experiencing adverse side effects from his current treatment, noted that there are no wrong answers among the multiple-choice selections provided below the vignette.
The first Clinical eFocus arrived in APA members' and Focus subscribers' inboxes last month.
After the dissemination of the interactive case presentation, there will be a subsequent e-mail featuring clinical commentary from an expert in the field and discussing the merits of the treatment options provided in the case presentation.
Focus co-editor Mark Rapaport, M.D., who is also chair of APA's Committee on CME and Lifelong Learning, called Clinical eFocus “an extension of APA's efforts to enhance learning for practicing psychiatrists.” ▪
