If you are planning to attend the 2005 Alliance for CME Annual Conference, scheduled for January 26-29, 2005 at the San Francisco Marriott, be sure to take advantage of the early-bird rate by registering before December 3.

It sounds like this year s program is going to be another good one.

For a look at the advance program, click here (these links are all PDFs, and take a little while to download)

For an exhibit prospectus, click here

For educational grant opportunities, click here

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According to a press release from Biomedical Market Newsletter, the Food and Drug Administration is planning to:

& revisit controversies surrounding the promotion and marketing of medical products, plus promotional claims made in advertisements and at trade show exhibitions. Journal ads and fliers may be targeted next. Medical product manufacturers can expect to witness a beefed-up presence of FDA and/or other government officials, collecting possible evidence of alleged violations. These may include such “no-no s” as promoting unapproved claims, or unclear language that describes the current status of unapproved products.

While this should make exhibitors and other suppliers increase their scrutiny of their practices at shows, it also means that show organizers who aren t responsible for the FDA compliance or lack thereof of their exhibitors/sponsors may have more FDA officials on their show floors. Even if it s not the show organizer s responsibility, it still doesn t look so hot when there s a writeup about FDA violations that occurred on your conference’s show floor in the Wall Street Journal.

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Looking for a reason to plan a meeting in London? How about the allure of scientific oddities, on view to the public for the first time at London s Science Museum.

In the medical section are displays of dentists’ chairs through the ages, drills for making holes in people’s skulls to let demons out, false teeth in a range of colours and ivory models of the male and female anatomy.



One of the most peculiar items is a small bottle labelled “Aphrodisiac” containing a variety of pills and carrying in small print at the bottom the warning “poison”

.

Or, if you want to stay in the U.S., AMNews offers a great selection of slightly odd possible medical museums of interest to docs while they re in town for your meetings.

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Since I just pulled together this list of links to articles about the PhRMA Code and related regs for someone on the MIMlist, a meeting planner listserv, I thought I’d post it here as well, in case anyone wants a refresher course or a quick resource to e-mail to others who might not be on top of it:

Cracking the Code

Advamed Takes on Ethics

McGettigan’s New Web Program Tackles PhRMA Code Compliance

CME providers gear up to comply with PhRMA code

PhRMA Adopts New Marketing Code

Thumbs Up for New PhRMA Code

The Party’s Over

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It may just be one or two out of an entire staff, but physicians who are yellers, screamers, and surgical instrument-throwers can be disruptive to patients and colleagues alike, according to a recent survey by the American College of Physician Executives.

When they do berate other healthcare workers or get snitty with patients, they rarely are punished, and in the rare case that they do get their wrists slapped, the slap is much gentler for physicians than other types of workers, the survey found.

“We have a horrible track record in our own profession of even recognizing physicians with difficult personalities, much less dealing effectively with them,” wrote one of more than 300 physician executives who submitted comments with their completed surveys&



“This has been a chronic problem that is acutely getting much worse,” wrote another survey respondent. “The stress of our jobs (I am a surgeon) is increasing due to the decrease in reimbursement for professional activities, increasing regulatory requirements and severe financial constraints placed upon the hospitals.”

The answer, of course, may lie in teaching organizational leaders on how to identify and deal with attitudinally impaired physicians, which is something survey co-authors Timothy Keogh, PhD, of Tulane University and William Martin, MPH, PsyD, of DePaul University do in their ACPE-sponsored courses.

If your organization has a few of these types on staff, it might be worth your while to offer some education on how to coach physicians on appropriate behavior, mediate disputes between doctors, nurses, and other staff, refer problem physicians to counseling, and take firm disciplinary measures against the offenders.

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A reader commenting on >Pharma in the hot seat again made a good point: “As a CME provider… Let’s not blame the pharma companies for everything; they market this way because it works. Regulations have changed & it is far more difficult for pharma to support lavish programs. However, the doctors still demand the same level of treatment. it will take a paradign shift from the doctors before this will change.”

Funny she should mention that the docs still want the perks pharma no longer can provide–that’s exactly what we found in our Annual Physicians Survey. Here’s an excerpt on what the physicians surveyed said:

A re-run of Dr. Marcia Angell s March appearance on “60 Minutes” last night reminds me of a recent article in BusinessWeek that also quoted Dr. Angell and the accusations she makes against pharma in her book, The Truth about Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. She claims that drugmakers have become “the main sponsors of clinical testing and physician education and are also a critical source of funding for the Food & Drug Administration.”

While the “60 Minutes” episode focused on importing drugs from Canada, in the BusinessWeek article, she says:

“Drug companies finance most of the continuing medical education of doctors, as well as meetings of professional societies. They lavish all manner of gifts on doctors in practice, including dinners in luxurious restaurants and trips (ostensibly for educational purposes) to exotic resorts. And they provide speakers and meals for interns and residents in teaching hospitals.



“The profession should acknowledge that this is all a form of marketing, which adds to the prices of prescription drugs. Doctors should take responsibility for their own education and buy their own meals.”

Whether you re a CME provider or in industry, be prepared to defend your practices better yet, get proactive and tell the media about all the safeguards you have in place to ensure the separation of promotion from education on both sides of the fence. Regardless of the PhRMA Code, the OIG Guidance, the latest revision of the Standards for Commercial Support, Stark II, and whatever new regulations come down the pike, this issue is not going to go away–and the best defense is a good offense.

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Bain Capital LLC, a private equity and venture capital group, earlier in August bought a controlling interest in the parent company of Pri-Med for a reported amount of $400 million.

Pri-Med, whose partnership with Harvard Medical School has resulted in high-level content for its meetings, has been growing like a weed lately. Its trade shows have made Tradeshow Week s Fastest Growing 50 list for the past two years; it s been pumping out Pri-Med Insight surveys on physician behavior and learning at a brisk pace; it started up a new Latin American division to bring its educational series south of the border last year; and it recently started a series of programs for pharmacists. In fact, its gone from 37 CME conferences just two years ago to producing 89 this year in 45 cities.

What this means for Pri-Med is unclear at this point, other than the fact that I m sure they were not thrilled to hear their business described in this article as “a company that arranges conferences to help members of the pharmaceutical industry meet with doctors.” See It s both what you say and how you say it, below, for more on this industry s perception problems.

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