Live Activities

• If a Registration Refund, Substitution and Cancellation Policy is not specifically stated on the registration fee page for the course, refunds will be honored (minus a $50 administration fee or 20%, whichever is less) if a written refund requests is received 10 working days prior to a given course.
• Cancelations less than 10 working days prior to the course start date is subject to 50% of the full tuition.
• Cancellation received less than 2 working days prior to the course start date is subject to 100% of the full tuition.
• No shows are subject to full tuition costs.

OnDemand Activities

• Refunds (minus a $50 administration fee or 20%, whichever is less) can be honored if a written refund request is received within 24 hours of purchase and our system shows no content was viewed or downloaded

Refund requests can be submitted to [email protected].

Creating an Account

• Go to https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/
• Click “Sign In” on the top left, and sign in using your email address and password.
• If you do not already have an account, click “Sign Up Now.”
• Click the “My CME” button on the top right.
• Click the “Profile” button.
• Update any necessary fields.

NOTE: Those fields marked with an asterisk are required. You must have selected a credit type and degree to receive credit upon completion of CME activities.

• When all information has been entered, click “Submit” at the bottom of the screen.

 

Updating Your Profile

• Go to https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/
• Click “Sign In” on the top left, and sign in using your email address and password.

If you do not already have an account, click “Sign Up Now.”

• Click the “My CME” button on the top right.
• Click the “Profile” button.
• Update any necessary fields.
• When all information has been entered, click “Submit” at the bottom of the screen.

NOTE: Those fields marked with an asterisk are required. You must have selected a credit type and degree to receive credit upon completion of CME activities.

For visual instructions and mobile app instructions click here.

Finding Your Transcript

• Go to https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/
• Click “Sign In” on the top left, and sign in using your email address and password.
• Click the “My CME” button on the top right.
• Click the “Transcript” button.
• Select a date range for the transcript records you wish to access. You will be able to email or download your transcript.

You can upload a transcript for CME Credits earned elsewhere by clicking the “Upload” button and selecting the file you wish to add to your Wills Eye Hospital transcript. The appended credits will display at the end, below Wills Eye Hospital activities.

For visual instructions and mobile app instructions click here.

Click or tap the button below that matches the app store for your operating system. When asked for an organization code upon login, please enter "willseye."

Via Text Message (Learners with U.S. Cell Phone Carriers Only)

• Pair your phone to your user account (initial one-time setup.)
Text the email address of your CloudCME account to (855) 959-3979.


• Text the 3-digit activity code to the number above
Before, during, and after each CME activity, the staff will display a slide showing the “event code” for the activity. Text the event code to the same number above, (855) 959-3979 to record your attendance. The deadline for texting attendance is 24 hours following the end of the activity.


• Complete any necessary course evaluation
The day after the activity, if you have reported your attendance, you you will receive an automated email with instructions for how to claim CME credit by completing the an evaluation on your account. If you haven't reported attendance within 24 hours of the activity, please contact [email protected]

Via the CloudCME Mobile App (All Learners U.S. and International)

• Open the CloudCME app and enter the organization code: Willseye.
Tap “Login” and enter your email address and password.


• Click on "Scan Attendance" and scan the QR code
Before, during, and after each CME activity, the staff will display a slide showing the event “QR code” for the activity. If you miss the code, please text attendance if able, or contact our [email protected] for assistance.

Viewing and Completing Tests

• Go to https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/
• Click “Sign In” on the top left, and sign in using your email address and password.
  
• Click the “My CME” button on the top right.
  
• Click the “Tests” button.
  
• Locate the activity, and click the “Pre-Test” and/or “Post-Test” button.

Complete the test. Once completed, the button will update to “Test Complete.” You can view your test results by clicking the “Test Results” button. You can print or download your test results.

For visual instructions and mobile app instructions click here

Accessing Evaluations and Certificates

• Go to https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/
• Click “Sign In” on the top left, and sign in using your email address and password.
• Click the “My CME” button on the top right.
• Click “Evaluations and Certificates.”

You can to view evaluations that need to be completed or and view or email certificates for activities you have already completed.

For visual instructions and mobile app instructions click here.

Viewing Registrations and Receipts

• Sign in to https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/
• Click “Sign In” on the top left, and sign in using your email address and password.
• Click the “My CME” button on the top right.
• Click the “Registrations and Receipts” button.

You can view all activities for which you have registered. If an activity has a fee, you can view your receipt—including any balances due—by clicking the “Receipt” button. You will be able tocan email or download your receipts, and there is an online payment link located near the bottom of receipts with an open balance.

For visual instructions, click here.

There Are Four Categories of CME Activities

Any CME activity must comply with AMA and ACCME requirements to be eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™.

Regularly Scheduled Series (RSS)

RSS are recurring activities in a series, which occur on a weekly or monthly basis.

Example: Wills Eye Hospital Chiefs’ Rounds Fridays @ 7:00AM

Conferences

Conferences sponsored by CME office generally focus on the diagnosis or treatment of a particular medical problem. They may last one day or take place over several days. Conferences seek to address identified needs and must be evaluated to ensure they meet these needs.

Examples: Joe Calhoun Pediatric Ophthalmology Forum, Annual Ophthalmology Review Course.

Enduring Materials

Printed, electronic or audio-visual media which is offered for an extended time to the learner on demand. Enduring Materials may be derived from live CME activities. In such a case, the CME Office will partner with the Audio-Visual team to make the content available on the CloudCME website, along with any handouts that the activity planner would like to include.

Examples: Chiefs’ Rounds Rebroadcasts, Visiting Professor OnDemand Series.

Performance Improvement Activities (PI)

PI is designed to target aspects of participants’ medical practice through an evidence-based program. Individuals or groups of physicians assess their current practices, learn about specific performance improvement measures, implement the new measures over a useful interval, and re-evaluate performance thereafter.

Objective

A strong curriculum lays the groundwork for successful CME. Your curriculum should address your learners’ needs and their resources, and should include three components:

• Clear educational objectives: What will your participants learn?
• Detailed instructional methods: How will you teach them this material?
• Integrated feedback mechanisms: How will you determine what they learned?

Educational grants often require these materials as well. Please contact us and we will be happy to help you design a curriculum that meets your CME goals!

Assess General Needs

Identify the overarching problem your program will address. Demonstrate its scope and importance with hard data, including references and/or statistics. Consider the following questions:

• Are physicians obtaining inadequate information from patients?
• Are treatments for a condition applied inconsistently?
• Does the current situation fall short of an ideal situation?
• If the problem is solved, how will patient care or patient outcomes be affected?

Identify Your Learners’ Needs

Think about the healthcare professionals you want to target and describe the specific education gap your program will fill. Use data to support your claims in this section as well. Show that an education gap exists, and show its effects on patient care and outcomes. Consider the following questions:

• What resources do your targeted learners already have?
• How does your proposed content fit their scope of practice?

Establish Specific, Measurable Objectives

Clear, measurable objectives tell your learners what to expect from your program. They also help you select appropriate teaching strategies and develop useful methods for assessment. Work to make your program’s objectives SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

You may also find Bloom’s Taxonomy useful. Comparing your objectives to these categories can clarify them and help you determine the best ways for your curriculum to meet them.

Choose Your Educational Strategies

• How can you use hands-on experience, group learning or other interactive teaching methods?
• What methods will make the best use of your learners’ resources to meet your objectives?
• How will you measure your program’s success at filling the education gap you identified?

Plan Your Program’s Details

A well-organized environment dramatically improves your learners’ experience. Plan out your program’s details well ahead of time and review your plan shortly before your activity takes place. Revise, clarify or add to your plan as needed. Your evaluations will reflect the time you spend planning.

How will you communicate the program’s objectives to your learners? Outline exactly what material you will cover and the teaching methods you will use.

• If your activity includes multiple speakers or several events over a period of time, how will you build these elements into a single, meaningful program?
• How will you address unexpected events, such as delayed speakers, faulty equipment or questions outside the program’s scope?

Evaluation and Feedback

Design feedback mechanisms to assess your learners’ performance and evaluate your program. Our programs commonly use ratings forms, self-assessment forms, questionnaires, tests, direct observation, performance audits and group discussions for evaluation and feedback. Your program objectives inform the teaching methods you develop, and the effects of your teaching methods show up in data from your feedback mechanisms. This data helps you reframe your program objectives on an ongoing basis.

What You Need to Know Before Applying for CME

We accept applications for new CME activities throughout the year. All applications submitted for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit^TM are reviewed by the CME Office. Submit your CME Activity Planning Application at least six months prior to your activity date.

If the activity director has financial relationships with companies relevant to your planned activity, the departmental CME committee — including at least two members without financial relationships — must assume responsibility for needs assessment, establishing objective(s), content development and speaker selection.

Planning Process

Please review an example of our Application Form. Be prepared to attach the following documents as part of the application:

• Activity Agenda
• Practice gap/needs assessment documentation
• Planning Committee and Faculty listing including academic and clinical appointments
• Marketing and publicity samples, if available
• List of prospective sources of commercial support, if applicable

Initial Application

• Contact the CME Office:
Shaunna Lee
CME Manager
Wills Eye Hospital
840 Walnut Street Suite 800
Philadelphia, PA 19107
[email protected]


• Submit CME Activity Planning Application and Required Forms. The Application must be completed online and is found here: https://willseye.cloud-cme.com/application.aspx


• Click on “New Application” to begin. You may close out of the application and return to make edits at any time as long as you fill out all the required (red boxed) questions in that section. Hit “Save and Continue” at the end of each section to proceed to the next section. Once finished with the application, click the “Submit to Review” button on your application screen.

Disclosure Forms and Conflict Resolution

Disclosure forms are completed directly online.

Activity directors, planning committee members, and presenters each will receive an email requesting to complete an online disclosure form. If there is an online disclosure already in the system, the CME office will confirm with the individual that the disclosure is accurate and up to date.

The Speaker/Planner Declaration Form must be completed by all speakers.

If the speaker has listed relevant relationships on this form, he/she has a potential conflict of interest (COI). A member of the CME committee who has no relationships with companies must complete the Faculty Disclosure Review Checklist Form describing how the COI was resolved to ensure the validity and independence of the activity’s content.

You may consider strategies such as these or others to resolve bias:

• Preview the content and assess the data on which recommendations are based.
• Advise the speaker to change the presentation’s focus, scope or objective.
e.g., less emphasis on a particular therapy, procedure or drug and more discussion of the pros and cons of alternatives.
• Select a different speaker who is unbiased or one whose presentation a trusted Wills Eye Hospital faculty member heard at a national or significant professional meeting.

For more information on financial disclosures, see “Standards for identifying and resolving conflicts of interest” under the guidelines and policies question below.

Program Promotion

Prepare notices, calendar postings or announcements that include:

• The program’s educational objective(s.)
• Accreditation statement (provided by the CME Office.)
• Credit statement (provided by the CME Office.)
• Disclosure summary, including acknowledgment of commercial support (if applicable.)

The CME Office MUST review and approve all announcements prior to printing and/or distributing electronically. Your publicity materials must include the information listed above to satisfy ACCME requirements.

The Activity Director or a member of the planning committee in attendance must sign the Activity Director Verbal Disclosure Form at each session.

Commercial Support or Promotion

If the activity is being supported by an unrestricted educational grant(s), the Letter of Agreement must be completed and signed with any supporting company, specifying the terms and conditions of the educational grant to your organization/unit.

The Letter of Agreement must be signed by the:

• Company providing support.
• Education provider (e.g., your department or organization.)
• Accredited provider (Wills Eye Hospital CME Office) Commercial supporters may not pay expenses directly.

Grants from commercial supporters must be sent directly to the education provider (e.g., your department or organization) or accredited provider (Wills Eye Hospital CME Office.)

Deadlines

Must be submitted before each program:

• Speaker/Planner Declaration Form.
• Faculty Review Checklist Form (if applicable.)
• Letters of Agreement (if applicable) must be submitted after each session (within 30 days of activity date.)
• Activity Director Verbal Disclosure Form.

During Program

Attendees can claim credit through theCloudCME app or via text message. The Wills Eye Hospital CME Office will provide the required QR Code and/or text details. The audience is required to be informed of all disclosure(s) provided by the speaker(s). The disclosure can be made by the activity director, a designee from your professional staff or the speaker(s).

Disclosure Examples:

• All financial relationships with companies are identified on the disclosure form, or
• The speaker has no relationships with any company whose products may be discussed — even generally — during the educational session, or
• The speaker refused to disclose relevant financial relationships and CME will not be available for that speaker’s presentation.

This declaration is required at all CME activities, including those without commercial support and with “internal” presenters.

Accreditation Statement

For directly provided activities:

For jointly provided activities:

Content Validity of Enduring Materials

Providers that produce enduring materials must review each enduring material at least once every three years or more frequently if indicated by new scientific developments.

So, while providers can review and re-release an enduring material every three years (or more frequently), the enduring material cannot be offered as an accredited activity for more than three years without some review on the part of the provider to ensure that the content is still up-to-date and accurate. That review date must be included on the enduring material, along with the original release date and a termination date.

Standards for Commercial Support

Commercial support, previously referred to as "educational grants," is categorized as financial or in-kind (equipment, supplies, services, and so on) contributions provided by an ACCME-defined ineligible. Should a company be interested in marketing opportunities, please see the commercial promotion guidelines below.

An ineligible company is defined by the ACCME as "any entity producing, marketing, reselling, or distributing health care goods or services consumed by, or used on, patients (in other words, pharmaceutical or device manufacturer.) Ineligible companies who provide financial or in-kind support for a CME activity are known as commercial supporters.

Financial support comes in the form of a monetary donation used to pay for all or part of the costs of a CME activity. In-kind support includes all non-monetary contributions from a commercial supporter, including:

• Equipment loans
• Disposable supplies (non-biological, such as instruments/materials)
• Animal parts or tissues
• Human parts or tissues
• Facilities or meeting space

Commercial supporters may not influence the content, planning, or implementation of educational activities! This prohibition includes needs assessment, learning objectives, faculty selection, educational design, vendor selection, or “technical review.”

For faculty presenters:

Faculty should be aware, activities supported by commercial interests, generic names should be used when discussing therapeutic or clinical options (i.e. use ranibizumab vs. Lucentis) logos must be removed or obscured on educational content or other materials provided by the commercial supporter (i.e. obscure logos on loaned equipment, and crop out logos on recordings from devices such as laser, which often display a proprietary logo on the upper part of the screen.) Employees of the ineligible company may be present during educational content for purposes of technical instruction on the use of loaned medical equipment, but they may not have control or input into educational content or clinical recommendations.

A Letter of Agreement is required for all commercial support arrangements, and activity planners are required contact the CME office [email protected] to create this letter prior to requesting any commercial support.

Standards for Commercial Promotion

Commercial promotion is distinct from commercial support in that its primary aim is to market the products and services of commercial companies. Types of promotions include commercial exhibits, advertisements, and satellite symposia: educational sessions which are promotional in nature, educating physicians and other medical professionals on the uses and benefits of the ineligible company’s proprietary products and services.

Placement of commercial promotions:

Commercial promotions must be kept entirely separate from educational content and from commercial support. Learners attending the activity must be able to participate in the education without interacting with the promotion, if they so choose.

Broadly, this means that promotional materials are not permitted in the same space and time as educational materials. Advertisements may not interfere with or intersperse with the educational content. One way to handle this is to reserve a separate space for promotional materials, such as an exhibit table, in a separate space from the educational activity and ensure that any paper advertisement is separated, not enclosed with educational brochures and programs.

Direct marketing:

Ineligible companies may wish to acquire names and contact information for learners for further marketing, promotional, and educational purposes. It is very important that individual learners explicitly consent to their information being shared. The CME office will not disclose lists of learner information without the learners explicit concent, and any requests from ineligible companies for such lists are required to work with the CME office to provide oversight over the acquisition of consent.

Standards for Identifying and Resolving Conflicts of Interest

In the spirit of avoiding commercial bias in accredited education, the ACCME asks CME providers to identify, mitigate, and disclose all relevant financial relationships between planners, faculty, or any other individual in control of educational content.

We do not need to identify, mitigate or disclose in the case of accredited non-clinical education, or accredited education where the learners themselves are in control of the content, such as spontaneous case discussions among peers.

The CME team takes a 5-step approach to achieve financial conflict resolution:

• Collect Information


Collect the names of ineligible companies and their relationships with the involved planners, faculty or other individuals going back 24 months. There is no minimum financial threshold, and individuals must disclose all financial relationships of any amount with ineligible companies. Individuals must disclose regardless of their view of the relevance of the relationship to the education. The CME office will contact you in advance of any activity where a disclosure is required, at least annually.



• Exclude owners or employees of ineligible companies


Any owners or employees of ineligible companies must be excluded from controlling content or participating as planners or faculty in accredited education, unless:

• The content is unrelated to the business lines or products of their employer/company.
• The content of the activity is limited to basic science research, such as pre-clinical research and drug discovery, or the methodologies of research, and they do not make care recommendations.
• They are only participating as technicians to teach safe and proper use of medical devices and do not recommend whether or when a device is used.

An individual holding stock in a privately held company (i.e. not publicly traded stock) for this purpose will be considered an owner.



• Identify relevant financial relationships


The CME office reviews information about all disclosed financial relationships to determine which are relevant. Financial relationships are relevant if the educational content an individual can control is related to the business lines or products of the ineligible company. For example, if a faculty member or planner is has a financial relationship with a company that produces a product to treat the cornea, this is deemed relevant if they are speaking on, or planning for, a cornea CE activity.



• Mitigate relevant financial relationships


The CME office is responsible for taking steps to prevent any individual with a relevant financial relationship from introducing commercial bias into educational content. Dr. Ralph C. Eagle, Jr., Director of Continuing Medical Education, will review on an individual basis any financial relationships of concern and mitigate the concerns prior to individuals assuming their roles in the educational activity. Planners with relevant relationships should be evaluated before planning begins, and faculty presenters should be evaluated before the day of the activity.

Mitigation options for planners with relevant financial relationships:

• Divest the financial relationship
• Recusal from controlling aspects of planning and content with which there is a financial relationship
• Peer review of planning decisions by persons without relevant financial relationships


Mitigation options for faculty with relevant financial relationships:

• Divest the financial relationship
• Peer review of content by persons without relevant financial relationships
• Attest that clinical recommendations are evidence-based and free of commercial bias (e.g., peer-reviewed literature, adhering to evidence-based practice guidelines)


• Disclose all relevant financial relationships to learners


The disclosure to learners occurs on the CloudCME website, visible when learners register for the activity, as well as at the beginning of each Live and OnDemand educational activity. The disclosure must include:

• The names of individuals with relevant financial relationships
• The names of the ineligible companies with which they have relationships
• The nature of the relationships
• A statement that all relevant financial relationships have been mitigated

Can’t find what you need? Email [email protected] for further assistance.