There are a couple of interesting articles in the latest edition of Pharma Marketing News that give a pharma spin to the value of CME: Faciliating Physician Access and Education through Online Conferencing, and the MSL Role in Educational Development.

Capsules’ co-blogger Anne Taylor-Vaisey has been busy lately! In an effort not to overwhelm, I’ll just post the basic info and links to all the articles she’s dug up this week:

Clever Nihilism: Cynicism in Evidence Based Medicine Learners, Medical Education Online
Free full text

Metheny WP, Espey EL, Bienstock J, Cox SM, Erickson SS, Goepfert AR et al. To the point: Medical education reviews evaluation in context: Assessing learners, teachers, and training programs. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2005; 192(1):34-37.
PubMed

Hattab AS. Current trends in teaching ethics of healthcare practices. Developing World Bioeth 2004; 4(2):160-172.
Free full text [scroll down and click on PDF]

The February 2005 issue of Medical Education is now available online from Blackwell Synergy

The role of the pharmaceutical industry in neurologic education. Neurology 2005; 64(2):E7-E10.
No link for this one, so here’s the scoop: Excerpt: Each year, the American Academy of Neurology (AAN)’s A.B. Baker Section on Neurologic Education conducts an Education Colloquium at the AAN annual meeting. The goals of the Colloquium are to heighten awareness, stimulate creative approaches, and foster dialogue among members regarding current trends, challenges, and opportunities in neurologic education. The theme of the 2004 Education Colloquium was the role of the pharmaceutical industry in neurologic education.

Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly involved in neurologic education, partly because of recent dramatic advances in the pharmacotherapy of neurologic diseases, and partly because of economic trends affecting medicine and academic medical centers. The growing role of the pharmaceutical industry in education has both positive and negative consequences.

Neurologists need to be informed about currently available medications and the clinical trials that provide evidence for their effectiveness. A major source of information is the material prepared by the pharmaceutical companies and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for drug labeling. For their part, pharmaceutical companies need to keep abreast of current trends and perceived needs in clinical and academic neurology. Furthermore, researchers in industry and researchers in academic neurology departments both benefit from openly communicating with each other. Thus, there are many ways in which industry involvement in neurologic education is desirable.

At the same time, this interaction is fraught with risks, because the priorities of the pharmaceutical industry differ from those of clinical and academic medicine. Pharmaceutical companies will predictably emphasize information that puts their products in the best possible light, introducing biases that can be difficult for trainees and even teachers to recognize (for example, focusing on distinctions that are not clinically meaningful, downplaying adverse results, and minimizing the role of non-pharmacologic management and the use of generic and off-patent drugs). Financial support and personal relationships can improperly influence how neurologists and trainees make decisions about medications, how teachers present information (and even how they decide what topics to cover), and how investigators conduct and interpret research.

The Association for Hospital Medical Education, in conjunction with the Association of Osteopathic Directors and Medical Educators (AODME) will host their Annual Spring Educational Institute at the Hilton Tucson El Conquistador Golf and Tennis Resort in Tucson, Arizona, May 11-14, 2005.

I just did a quick skip through the program, but it sounds like a must-attend for hospital-based CME providers–I’d love to go to the sessions on the future of CME and CPD and leadership as a change agent! There also are sessions specifically for osteopathic educators, and a separate program geared to support staff in the Osteopathic GME office will be offered on Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14.

Check out the brochure or call AHME at (724) 864-7321.

I’ve been e-chatting lately with a reader who was curious about the role of pharma sales reps in CME, which seems to be evolving in light of today’s harshly scrutinous (is that a word?) climate.

It’s hard to say definitively. Each company seems to deal with all the new rules and regs a little differently. In researching, writing and/or reading these articles–Frustration Factor, Why Can’t Reps Distribute CME Activities?, Code Blue for CME, among others–I’m leaning toward the opinion that the sales rep is going to be edged out of

CME altogether one of these days. While some companies are still keeping them in the loop, the whopping fines paid recently for any whiff of impropriety, along with the ACCME’s new Standards for Commercial Support, which seem to frown on the practice, makes me think their CME days are

numbered. There are a lot of CME providers who hope I’m wrong about that, and I may very well be. But the shift I’m seeing is to separate promotion from education as much as possible, which makes keeping the rep involved risky at best.

More and more companies are coming down on the side of restricting their reps from doing anything other than give the requesting institution a phone number to call (i.e., either the MedEd provider or the company’s Medical Affairs department). There are still a few holdouts that keep the reps in the middle, but for good or for ill, I tend to think we’ll see less and less of that in the future.

Is this good or bad for CME? Hard to say–I can see two sides to that coin.

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