In a post that begins, “CME has become tainted,” DB’s Medical Rants–a physician-run blog–has lots to say about the new ACCME Standards for Commercial Support:

This rule appears solid on surface review. The problem will be in finding experts without conflict of interest. In many fields, virtually all the experts receive some pharmaceutical support (often for drug trials).



I suspect that we will see a new  specialty arise in CME. Those who have no financial ties will become the truth arbiters. And again on surface review this seems logical.




I worry that these new experts will have another axe to grind. None of us is without bias. Those who accept no pharmaceutical moneys (and I am included here) may have an anti-pharmaceutical company bias. They may tend towards therapeutic nihilism (at least until the evidence is overwhelming).

Uh oh, I posted about the new ACCME Standards for Commercial Support yesterday without reading all the related documents on the Web site. Things have changed since I last perused the document.

This morning I start getting calls from CME providers who have some serious concerns with the Identifying and Resolving Conflicts of Interest in Continuing Medical Education addendum that was released along with the new Standards, and now I realize that the article I referenced yesterday actually did get it right after all. My apologies to the AP reporter, whose story got picked up and is all over the place now.

For example, from today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Under the proposed rules, doctors with financial ties to a drug company would be told what kind of recommendations they could make during a teaching presentation. Those instructions would be given to the doctor by a third party with no links to the drug company, the AP reported.

I need to read through all this much more carefully before I can make any intelligent comment on it, but my gut is screaming, “First Amendment.” Anyway, I’d love to hear what you think–many of those I spoke with this morning believe this addendum actually rolls the Standards back to the earlier draft, which so many objected to. More later…

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.

This post is courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

Below is is the abstract and full text link for an article published September 29 (!) in BMC Medical Education. Here is the home page for this online journal:

Maziar Abdolrasulnia, Blanche C Collins, Linda Casebeer, Terry Wal , Claire Spettell, Midge N Ray, Norman W Weissman and Jeroan J Allison. .Using email reminders to engage physicians in an Internet-based CME intervention. BMC Medical Education 2004, 4:17 doi:10.1186/1472-6920-4-17

Full text (pdf)

Abstract (provisional)

Background: Engaging practicing physicians in educational strategies that reinforce guideline adoption and improve the quality of healthcare may be difficult. Push technologies such as email offer new opportunities to engage physicians in online educational reinforcing strategies. The objectives of this study are to investigate 1) the effectiveness of email reminders in engaging recruited community-based primary care physicians in an online guideline reinforcement strategy designed to promote Chlamydia screening, 2) the characteristics of physicians who respond to email reminders, as well as 3) how quickly and when they respond to email announcements.