WED-117 - Dual Impact: Leveraging Continuing Medical Education to Uncover Gaps in Congenital Syphilis Care
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM PST
Location: Plaza Foyer, Plaza Level
Area of Responsibility: Area IV: Evaluation and Research Keywords: Evaluation@@@Infectious Disease@@@Maternal and Child Health@@@Workforce Development, Subcompetencies: 1.1 Plan assessment., 1.4 Synthesize assessment findings to inform the planning process. Research or Practice: Practice
Director, Public Health WebMD & Medscape Newark, New Jersey, United States
Learning Objectives:
At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Describe how a needs assessment can be planned to serve multiple purposes for maximized efficiency.
Discuss the three clinician practice gaps related to congenital syphilis to be addressed in future educational or promotional campaigns.
Evaluate how a dual-purpose educational format can serve as a template to assess knowledge and performance gaps within specific target populations.
Brief Abstract Summary: Discover the power of dual-purpose education: a Q&A-style activity that both delivers education and assesses baseline practice gaps. Recognize critical gaps in syphilis/congenital syphilis care among Ob-Gyn, Peds, and PCPs, including low confidence, urgent treatment delays, and inconsistent protocols. Gain a replicable model for designing interventions that continuously generate the data needed to fuel effective, targeted public health education and promotion campaigns, fostering measurable improvement in clinical practice.
Detailed abstract description: Attendees will learn how to implement a dual-purpose Q&A-style educational design that serves as a powerful tool for needs assessment and continuous quality improvement. This presentation showcases how this model simultaneously delivers education while gathering quantitative data on performance to identify urgent practice and knowledge gaps. This process transforms a one-time learning event into a data-collection instrument that informs future, high-impact public health initiatives focused on enhancing prevention efforts and clinical outcomes, and maximising the impact of limited resources.
Key takeaways will include:
1) The Dual-Purpose Model: Analyze the mechanism of a Q&A-based continuing education activity designed for concurrent content delivery and gap analysis, providing a template for attendees to evaluate their own target populations.
2) Critical Syphilis Insights: Glean urgent, actionable knowledge from the aggregated data of more than 200 clinicians across three specialties (Ob-Gyn, Pediatrics, PCP). These insights are immediately valuable for any professional working in the field of sexual and maternal health, revealing deficiencies that hinder the prevention of stillbirth, infant death, and congenital morbidity: - Treatment Urgency: Many clinicians delay empiric treatment for probable congenital syphilis in infants, prioritizing confirmatory testing - a major, potentially fatal practice gap. - Complex Management: Persistent confusion over guideline-concordant care, such as desensitization for penicillin-allergic pregnant women and inconsistent follow-up testing (e.g., RPR at 6 months). - Documentation and Confidence: Low rates of maternal serology documentation in infant charts and low confidence scores in managing syphilis in pregnant women and newborns.
This presentation inspires action by providing both a valuable programmatic model and critical public health findings, maximizing the impact of limited resources for the public health education community. Funding for this activity was provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women's Health.
