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 unlimited continuing education (CE)/continuing medical education (CME) to health care professionals and teams who actively treat service members, veterans, and their family members. Activities for health care teams may apply to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, physician assistants, optometrists, social workers, psychologists, dentists, dental hygienists, dental technicians, occupational therapists, counselors, health care executives, case managers, and kinesiotherapists. 

Mission

  • Provide innovative, centralized, and cost-effective continuing education (CE) activities to health care 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 health care professions. This infrastructure includes a comprehensive learning management system that is accessible and relevant to the evolving health care 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 health care 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 health care.
  • Maintain good standing with accrediting organizations and expand the scope of CE subject matter to meet health care 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 health care 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 health care team in patient care.
  • Enhanced strategies and skills in military health care 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 health care 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 health care 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.