Lyme disease (LD) is emerging in the state of Michigan. A 2013 assessment by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services identified gaps in physician knowledge and practices toward LD. Education targeted to healthcare providers (HCP) concerning LD is essential in a state where the risk of LD is increasing. An online LD toolkit was created, which includes a website, an on-demand webinar with 0.50 Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits, and various printed resources. The objectives are to increase HCP knowledge about LD and evaluate the educational toolkit.
METHODS:
The website and webinar information were shared via email, conferences, hospital newsletters, and website postings. A pre- and post-test were administered to all webinar participants obtaining CME credit. Each participant completed a pre-test with eight randomly chosen questions from a 13 question bank, watched the webinar, and completed a post-test with a new set of eight randomly chosen questions from the same bank. To receive credit, the participant had to receive at least 75 percent on the post-test. To compare significance between pre-test and post-test scores, a Wilcoxon signed rank test was used. To assess information retention a second post-test was distributed to participants who completed the webinar for CME credit a month or more after their post-test. Qualitative measures of toolkit utilization will be assessed from a survey distributed along with the second post-test. SAS 9.2 was used for statistical analysis.
RESULTS:
The website and webinar went live on July 6, 2015. As of December 31, 2015 the LD HCP toolkit page received 431 hits. There were 46 unique users who registered for the webinar. The participants included 18 nurses, 11 physicians, 7 local health department staff, and 5 other. Of those who registered for the webinar, 28 completed the webinar for CME credit. The average pre-test score was 4.5 and post-test score was 6.9. In total, there was a 30 percent increase between pre- and post-test scores. A significant difference was found (p-value= 0.000018.) between the pre-test and post-test median scores.
CONCLUSIONS:
HCP are an important audience to target for LD education. We demonstrated a significant increase in LD knowledge in webinar users. This is encouraging in terms of program evaluation as we can infer that the webinar information was useful and improved knowledge of this particular public health topic. Further distribution of the toolkit is needed to increase HCP LD knowledge in Michigan.