DHA J-7, CEPO

The Defense Health Agency (DHA), J-7 Education and Training Directorate, Continuing Education Program Office (CEPO) supports the DHA Directorates and Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs) in reviewing, accrediting, and awarding continuing education (CE)/continuing medical education (CME) to healthcare professionals and teams who actively treat service members, veterans, and service members' families.

Mission

• Provide innovative, centralized, and cost-effective continuing education (CE) activities to healthcare professionals throughout the enterprise to sustain the health of those entrusted to DHA’s medical care.
• Employ the latest educational and technical advancements through an efficient infrastructure that plans, approves, tracks, reports, and facilitates CE accreditation services for multiple healthcare professions. This infrastructure includes a comprehensive learning management system that is accessible and relevant to the evolving healthcare system.
• Disseminate evidenced-based life-long learning.
• Implement a systems approach that integrates measures of access, quality, patient safety, medical readiness, and efficiency in assessing program effectiveness.
• Demonstrate that healthcare teams receive quality CE that is designed to be independent, free from commercial bias, based on valid content, and effective in improving the quality and safety of collaborative healthcare.
• Maintain good standing with accrediting organizations and expand the scope of CE subject matter to meet healthcare professionals’ diverse and evolving needs.

Goals

CEPO activities aim to facilitate best practices, interprofessional learning, and military readiness to enhance the knowledge, skills, and practices of healthcare professionals and teams. Learners evaluate each CE activity to determine the extent to which the program achieved its expected results. These results include:

• Knowledge and implementation of evidence-based, best practices for the healthcare team in patient care.
• Enhanced strategies and skills in military healthcare professionals by providing education activities that seek to educate those who treat our active and veteran military force.
• Improved interprofessional communication skills for learning about and from the members of the healthcare team.
• Committed to life-long learning and the application of knowledge, skills, and practices in the clinical setting.
• Learner participation in assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation of CE activities.
• Facilitated improvements in the collaborative team approach to patient care by educating providers of new methodologies or the importance of existing processes.
• Identify, prioritize, and translate evidence-based practices and research into clinical standards, thereby improving quality and increasing efficiency in healthcare delivery across the continuum of care.

The CEPO CE program supports DHA strategic goals to– (1) optimize the DHA for greater performance and (2) co-create optimal outcomes for health, well-being, and readiness–by institutionalizing a supportive learning environment, creating and codifying learning processes and practices, and promoting leadership practices that enforce a culture of life-long learning.