Utilization of marketing automation tools for delivery of a faculty development curriculum

TL;DR

This paper explores using marketing automation tools to deliver a 52-week curriculum for physician educators, showing it can effectively and sustainably improve teaching and evaluation skills.

Contribution

The novel use of marketing automation tools for faculty development in clinical education is demonstrated, with insights into its reach and sustainability.

Findings

The program reached over 4500 unique recipients with 10,499 content impressions across 104 weeks.

Faculty engagement with educational materials remained stable or increased over two years.

Resident evaluations of faculty improved in six key domains after program implementation.

Abstract

Physician clinical educators play important roles in teaching, providing feedback, and evaluating trainees, but they often have variable preparation and competing demands on their time that make universal participation in workshops, seminars, or short courses designed to foster these skillsets inefficient or impossible.

We designed and implemented a 52-week synchronous curriculum designed to address faculty opportunities to improve teaching skills, feedback for residents and medical students, and evaluation skills, which were delivered using marketing automation tools, including text messaging and email. We evaluated the programmatic impact and feasibility of using the implementation science framework.

Over a 104-week evaluation period, there were at least 10,499 total content impressions and 4558 unique recipients, indicating the significant reach of this program to approximately 120 faculty members. Faculty engagement with continuing education materials remained stable or increased over the 2-year evaluation period, indicating that programs like ours can have sustainable impacts. Resident evaluations of faculty across the six key domains also improved after the implementation of the program.

Our experience with digital marketing tools reflects that they can be used to deliver impactful curricular content to faculty for continuing educational purposes and that faculty can use these resources in a sustainable way. However, because of the incomplete reach with any single communication, this type of content delivery is not appropriate for isolation as a material of critical importance. More research is needed to identify the best practices and additional education-related uses of this technology.

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