CPD Homes are just around the corner.  In the new year, almost all of Australia's 120,000 doctor will be required to join a CPD Home.  Right now, only the 16 Australasian colleges, and two non-college providers are accredited and operational - one of which is Osler.

In this sit down with Osler co-founder and chief medical officer Dr Todd Fraser, we'll explore what Osler is bringing to the table.

Osler

Is Osler now fully accredited?

Todd Fraser 

Yes it is.  As of Friday 24th November 2023, Osler can operate as a CPD Home for all doctors in Australia.  From an operational perspective, you can try it now until the end of the year, we won't officially start offering CPD Home services until 1st January 2024.

It offers everything that a CPD home should obviously. We've been through the accreditation process, which is very robust. And at this point in time, as you probably know, only the college's, the AMA WA, the Skin Cancer College Australasia and Osler are operational as CPD homes. 

Osler

Congratulations, you must be delighted

Todd Fraser

Thank you very much. It's very, very pleasing and very rewarding to finally get over the line. It's a lot of hard work to do so. And to be fair, I think it's, it's a good thing for consumers that it is such a robust process, because they can have confidence that anyone who is offering superior services has met a pretty high standard.

Osler

Who is your CPD Home for?

Todd Fraser

Absolutely everyone!

Not all doctors need a CPD Home - PGY1-2 doctors, official college trainees and overseas-trained specialists who are seeking recognition as a specialist are exempt. All other Australian-registered doctors must have a CPD Home however.

Osler has been accredited to provide CPD Home services to all eligible doctors, including all the specialties.

It’s important to note that CPD Homes don’t need to provide content themselves necessarily. Osler doesn’t have content available for every specialty - our members may source their own content from anywhere they like, as long as it is relevant to their scope of practice. Importantly though, we help you to capture all the activities and store your documentation, in case you’re audited.

Additionally, there’s content relevant to all specialists, including resources related to wellness, ethical practice and so on.

Most importantly, all doctors need to undertake activities related to Measuring Outcomes and Reviewing Performance. This isn’t always easy, but Osler has tools to help make this as efficient as possible, and no matter what specialty you practice in, this will still be relevant to you.

Osler

So as you said, it's the colleges, the AMA WA, Skin Cancer College Australasia and Osler. How is Osler setting itself apart?

Todd Fraser 

I guess there's a few points to this - one is where we come from. Osler has been operating for nine years now, in a variety of guises. We provide services to a university Medical School - that's around accreditation in workplace assessment and a few other tools that they use. We also provide procedural certification services to a couple of hospitals. 

But importantly, we’ve been offering our services to individuals for several years. This is important, because unlike many other systems, we focus a lot of attention on what the user needs, rather than the organisation that owns the system.

This influences many things, from security and accessibility to your data, the user interface itself and the time-saving tools we build into the platform.

But we've really come at this from an education perspective, that's our DNA.  We want to provide both content and tools that help people be better versions of themselves - that's our goal.

When we saw this opportunity, rather than taking the view that we were going to build an administrative tool that would help people meet an accreditation standards, we've taken the view that we were ideally positioned to help people go through the CPD process and get genuine value for it educationally.

Osler

What does that mean, in practical terms?

Todd Fraser 

Well, there's a lot of content, we've got well over 1200 individual content items, including podcasts, articles, journal reviews, quizzes, you name it, there's a tonne of stuff on there for people to use.  

And we pride ourselves on the quality of the content we provide. Online learning doesn’t have a great name, particularly in healthcare, but largely that’s simply because it isn’t funded and developed properly. With effort, funding and imagination, online learning can be incredible. A great example is our ALS simulator, where you can practice applying the ALS algorithm to a patient and get personalised feedback.

It’s all built into the system and included in the subscription, you don't have to pay extra for it. Every time you do something, it can immediately and simply be added to your CPD Diary.

Over time, we're also developing partnerships with third parties to make sure that we can deliver additional content to fill in some of the gaps we have in our collection. But users can be reassured that we've cherry picked the really good quality stuff - it's a bit like that comparison between Netflix and YouTube. YouTube is a open for all, and it's very difficult to tell what's good quality and what's not. Whereas Netflix, you know it's going to be a professional standard. We want to try and curate the available content for people and say, here's really good quality stuff. 

But we had also developed a number of great learning tools already to help people be better versions of themselves. Tools like a logbook, to enable you to review what you actually do, a self reflection journal so that you could document the things that you learn about your practice in some way, and a learning planner. These tools have been in our portfolio for ages, and then CPD Homes came along asking people to do exactly the same things.  So there is an opportunity for us to help people use these tools efficiently and effectively for their learning

Osler

Are you concerned about the competition in the market?

Todd Fraser

I think one of the best things about CPD Homes is it's now a competitive environment. Previously, if you're an intensivist like me, you had no choice, you have to use the ICU college’s CPD program. Actually, you did have another choice, you could do it yourself which takes effort. Because there wasn't a competitor, there is no driver for service improvement.  As a result, many doctors are quite frustrated with the CPD services they are getting from their colleges.

Now, no matter what level you are, whether you're a specialist, whether you're a Career medical officer, or whether you're a junior doctor, you've got a choice. And I think that competition going to drive development and keep prices low.

For us, that means we're going to continually strive to make our platform as good as it possibly can be to get better reach and give people a better experience, for example the user interface is incredibly important to consumers.

We've built tools that make things as easy as possible for people to achieve their CPD targets too. There are lots of built-in automations that help people to get additional hours or to better capture what they're already doing. For example, if you do a self reflection in your portfolio, you'll automatically get an entry in your CPD diary to reflect that. The same with activities like the logbook, which immediately captures that as a self audit, and enables you to tick off the really difficult parts of your CPD, which is reviewing performance and measuring outcomes.

Osler

What’s coming down the pipeline? Do you have any new toys to try out?

Todd Fraser

Yes, definitely! I can’t give away too much, but we’ll be releasing a heap of great tools to help users get their CPD Hours done with a minimum of fuss.

For example, rather than just logging activities you do like audits and surveys, you can actually perform them through Osler, and this will automatically be added to your CPD Hours.

But there are some great opportunities now available with AI and other advances, so the potential is boundless.

Osler

Is that all through an app or online, or both? 

Todd Fraser  

Both on the web and through an app, and it's all integrated. That enables people to get their CPD done as quickly as possible, but at the same time, maintain a high level of quality as well.

Osler

What does it cost?

Todd Fraser

What we've what we've heard from users is that they believe that the price point that alternatives are charging is not necessarily consistent with the service that they're getting. 

Due to the other services we provide, we can deliver our CPD Home at a much more affordable price - we have decided to come into the market at $249 per year. Additionally, new members can try it for the first three months of 2024, obligation free, which we believe gives people choice. And again, feedback from users was that they feel like they've been shoehorned into certain options. To give them choice gives them a sense of control about all of this.  

And even better, we’re offering a discount to any early adopters out there. If they register and check us out, and like what they see they can subscribe at just $199 for 2024. I’m not sure how long this will last though, so people have to move quickly!

Osler

Do you think many people have already joined a CPD Home?

Todd Fraser

There is a lot of uncertainty among doctors about what these new changes mean. Even talking to doctors during the past month, most that we talked to still didn't understand what CPD homes are, what it means for them, what they're required to do. 

But according to an article that the medical board published in November on CBD homes, the MBA indicated that all Australian doctors will need to define who their CPD home is when they go through the registration process in September 2024. So when they go and fill out their registration, pay their money for 2024, they’ll have to indicate which of the CPD homes they belong to. 

My understanding talking to people, particularly the market that we're most interested in, which is the prevocational doctors between PGY three, and PGY six or there abouts, and Career medical officers, none of them seem to know about CPD Homes at all! They've never done a structured CPD program before, whereas anyone who's in a college will already have done CPD, so it's not that big a change. But there's about 20,000 doctors who this applies to have never done it before.

I don't think that there's anything remotely like a saturated market yet. I would say at best 10% of that market has made a decision already.