For physicians

Updated Dignity in Pregnancy and Childbirth

⏰  60 minutes (includes required activities)

🏆 1.0 Continuing Education credit available (ACCME / AMA PRA Category 1 CME)

📜 Certificate of Completion
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What Your Colleagues Say:

"It's very consistent with what I learned about medical errors and cognitive biases, only this time with something I can do about it."

"What I liked most about this course was competence/warmth ratio ..This was something new for me."

"I really liked the examples given were simple and realistic."

"The application of evidence to analyze the problem was new and helpful"

As clinicians, we strive to provide all our patients the highest quality of care.

Every physician aims to give each patient their best care. Yet a large body of evidence shows how the quality, consistency, and safety of perinatal care can vary in ways clinicians never intend, driven less by knowledge or values than by the conditions in which care is delivered: time pressure, high cognitive load, fatigue, and stress.

This course translates evidence from neuroscience, cognitive and social science, and clinical communication research into practical tools physicians can use in their next encounter. It focuses on the moments where decisions and communication are most vulnerable to automatic cognitive shortcuts, and provides in-the-moment techniques that keep judgment steady and communication clear under real-world conditions.

For organizations, it offers a consistent, evidence-based, and fully documented way to strengthen perinatal quality and safety across clinicians, shifts, and sites. It is built on measurable objectives, accredited for CME, and refined through evaluation with thousands of clinicians, supporting both quality-improvement goals and reporting needs.

What You Gain

Reliable Quality and Safety for Every Patient and Setting
Practical, evidence-based skills that improve decision accuracy, communication clarity, and consistency of care, built for real clinical workflows and demanding conditions.

For Clinicians

  • More consistent assessments and treatment decisions across patients and settings
  • Fewer avoidable communication breakdowns
  • In-the-moment tools that keep judgment steady under time pressure, cognitive load, and stress
  • Communication that strengthens patient trust, engagement, and follow-through
  • Skills that reinforce the impact of your existing protocols and checklists

For Organizations

  • Greater reliability across clinicians, shifts, and sites
  • Stronger alignment between quality and safety goals and front-line practice
  • Evidence-based content with documented, measurable objectives that support reporting
  • Training that scales across disciplines and care environments

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

  • Describe common sources of unintended variation in the quality, consistency, and safety of perinatal care.


  • Explain how time pressure, cognitive load, fatigue, and stress increase reliance on automatic cognitive shortcuts, and how those shortcuts can contribute to unintended variation in perinatal communication and clinical decisions.


  • Recognize how rapid first impressions form during an encounter and can influence attention, clinical decision-making, and communication in ways that were never intended.


  • Apply at least three in-the-moment techniques that interrupt automatic cognitive shortcuts before they affect assessment, decisions, or communication.


  • Demonstrate communication behaviors that strengthen patient partnership, trust, and informed decision-making.


  • Use respectful, individualized communication practices that reflect how each patient wishes to be identified and addressed.


  • Apply evidence-based tools to deliver consistent, high-quality perinatal care across the full range of patients and clinical situations.

Course Format

Video elearning, job-aides, essential reading, and reflective activities. The self-paced format allows you to learn at your convenience.

Who Should Enroll

Primary: All physicians who care for patients during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period.

For organizations: Recommended for obstetrics, family medicine, maternal-fetal medicine, emergency, and hospitalist physicians involved in perinatal care. Suitable for department-level or system-wide assignment, with a certificate of completion and measurable objectives for your records.

Why do Optum Health, Mayo Clinic, Boston Scientific, Hospital Association of New York, HealthPartners, Cleveland Clinic, the Permanente Medical Group, Sutter Health, Confluence Health, The Indiana Hospital Association, and the California Health Care Foundation, among others, choose our courses?

In their words:

#unmatched expertise | #the best we have seen | #truly evidence-based  | #top marks from our doctors | #head & shoulders above the rest  

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