Dave Davis Senior Director, Continuing Education and Performance Improvement Association of American Medical Colleges, Washington, DC

Adjunct Professor, Department of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, and Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto

Currently the AAMC’s lead for continuing healthcare education and improvement, Dave was a family physician in Ontario, Canada for nearly forty years. For much of that time, he was active in ‘CME” as: chairman of an all-staff inter-professional CE program at a community hospital; director of Continuing Medical Education and subsequently chair of continuing education at McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences; associate dean, continuing education, and founding director of the Knowledge Translation (Implementation Science) Program in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto; and chairman of Ontario’s Guidelines Advisory Committee. This last role allowed Dave the opportunity to explore and test models of clinical practice guideline development, adaptation and implementation of best evidence on a province- wide basis.

Dave has also developed an innovative comprehensive competency assessment program for the provincial licensing body, and helped create a center for faculty development and a Mini- Med School at the University of Toronto. Emphasizing evaluation of educational activities using a rigorous outcomes-testing approach, he has acted as PI, Co-PI or investigator on grants totaling several million dollars. This emphasis has seen the publication of 125 peer-reviewed papers, in addition to dozens of abstracts, book chapters, two major books on CME practices, and presentations on four continents. His (and colleagues’) 1995 JAMA systematic review of the effect of CME interventions is widely cited as a seminal study in this field.

Finally, Dave has been chair or president of national or provincial Canadian organizations, two North American organizations (the Alliance for CME and the Society for Academic CME) and the Guidelines International Network, a global organization dedicated to the development and implementation of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. His current role in the AAMC permits him to opportunity to work with individuals, associations, groups and academic medical centers to create scholarly, integrated models of effective, performance-based continuing education.