The California Medical Association (CMA) announced the winners of its continuing medical education (CME) Provider Awards during its annual CME Providers Conference in June. CMA recognizes outstanding achievements in five different areas each year.

Outstanding CME Professional Award: This award recognizes individuals who provide support, dedication and overall assistance to strengthen the entire CME effort their organization. This year, two individuals were awarded:

• Min Choi  has been with University Health Services of UC Berkeley for more than six years. Her diligence, resilience and creativity allowed her to provide an artisanal CME program that meets the needs of the primary care and urgent care learners she works with.
• Erin Parker  has been the CME Coordinator for Community Memorial Health System for more than two years and has made a big impact. She focused on creating activities that addressed real practice gaps for her learners by collaborating with department chairs, as well as the quality department.

Outstanding CME Leadership Award: This award recognizes individuals who provide leadership, dedication and overall guidance to strengthen the entire CME effort within their organization.

• Ingrid Lim, M.D., has been the CME Chief at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco for over 13 years. During that time, she has grown the program to one of the largest within the Kaiser Permanente system, offering over 500 hours annually. As an educator she has received numerous awards, including the Charlotte C. Baer Memorial Award at UC San Francisco and the 2021 Permanente Medical Group Teaching Award for Excellence in Medical Education.

CLC & IB Innovation Award: This award recognizes CME providers that exemplify the goal of integrating cultural and linguistic competency (CLC) & implicit bias (IB) into their overall CME program and organization by going above and beyond the set CLC and IB standards to reduce health care disparities. Two awards are given, one for an overall program and one for a single activity.

• The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG) Physician Education and Development received the overall program honor. TPMG has over 9,000 physician learners in its system and has incorporated the Standards for CLC and IB (developed in 2021) into its overall CME program. TMPG also revised all activity planning forms to include CLC/IB and have made it a focus of their planners to identify and address disparities during every activity. TPMG has also created a faculty tip sheet that advises teaching staff of the requirements and directs them to resources that can help them incorporate. In addition, they developed educational activities for faculty, giving guidance on implementing CLC/IB, which includes issues faced by faculty when facilitating challenging conversations about race, bias and disparity.
   
• The H.E.A.R. Justice Lecture Series (Health Equity and Racial Justice), developed by Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, received the honor for an individual activity. This activity was innovative from inception of content and speakers to format and audience. The planners identified that not all patients are treated equally, nor does experience equal health outcomes. Content was based on disparities noted in the literature, patient care complaints/examples, and has proceeded to now include requests by physicians and hospital staff as they become aware of their own biases and increase their knowledge of health care inequities. The series was provided virtually (live) to all three hospitals and all employees (administrators, clerks, security, janitorial, nurses and allied health care providers), not just physicians. The series is moderated by the medical staff president. The overwhelming response to the initial sessions helped catapult policy change.

Innovation in CME – Individual Activity: This award recognizes organizations that create activities to meet the evolving needs of their learners through innovation and creativity, in areas such as educational approach, design, assessment or use of technology.

• Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara: Physician Directed Patient Self Examination Clinical Skills in Telemedicine received this award. The CME team collaborated with the technology physician lead, communication consultant lead and IT to design an enduring material, online self-paced CME activity. The goal of this activity was to provide physicians performing a virtual physical examination with a set of skills and strategies, both visual via videos and written via flashcards, with specific physical examination techniques that the patient can self-perform during a video visit. The purpose is to help physicians gain both confidence and competence in the virtual exam setting. The activity was a success, with 94% of learners indicating that they would use the skills learned in future telehealth appointments.