A heartfelt congratulations to Lewis A. Miller, principal of WentzMiller & Associates, who was honored with the Precepts of Hippocrates Award in recognition of his international achievements in CME at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Global Alliance for Medical Education last week. People from 14 countries came to see him get his award–just kidding, they came for the conference, too. Which I hear was a good one this year (I didn’t get to go, but my editor, Tamar Hosansky, did). From the press release:

In presenting the award, Mark Evans, president of GAME and director of healthcare education at the American Medical Association (AMA), stated: “It is only fitting and proper on this 10th anniversary of GAME that we honor our founder [ed. note: Whoops, I missed the typo that said “funder” here! Fixed now], Lewis Miller. Through his vision and commitment, the international community has been strengthened, healers educated and patients‘ lives improved.” Miller‘s accomplishments in the field include the founding not only of GAME but also of the Alliance for CME for North American CME professionals. He has started medical publishing and education companies in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Australia and worked closely with professional medical societies and pharmaceutical company sponsors around the world.



He and his WentzMiller partner, Dennis K. Wentz MD, former head of CME at the AMA, are currently working on development of a worldwide program to improve healthcare through education of generalist doctors.

Anne Taylor-Vaisey points out this article in particular as one CME providers might find interesting:

Acad Med. 2005 Jul;80(7):680-4. Related Articles, Books

How can physicians’ learning styles drive educational planning?

Armstrong E, Parsa-Parsi R.

Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical International, 1135 Tremont St., Suite 940, Boston, MA 02120.

As changes in health care delivery systems and in the global burden of disease call for a reassessment of how tomorrow’s physicians should be educated-indeed, for a reconsideration of the diversity of roles the physician should play-there is an immediate need to produce continuing medical education (CME) programs with real impact. Curriculum planners are questioning both the content of medical education and the methods of instruction and training. The product, or content, and the mechanism for its delivery have been defined and discussed, but a significant body of literature has shown that new knowledge does not necessarily lead to new behavior. Ample evidence exists in the CME literature to support the implementation of more active and self-directed learning strategies to promote the desired change in behaviors. The question, then, that is the focus of this article is how educational planning might be better guided by an understanding of how physicians learn within the continuing medical education domain. Revisiting the principles of David Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory, the authors propose applying his experiential learning model to overall curriculum design work. The authors argue that promoting the application of all learning styles in sequence in an educational encounter is a most desirable approach, and that this approach to learning could extend far beyond individual learners to influence how every component of medical education is designed, from the individual lecture or class activity to entire courses or programs.

PMID: 15980086 [PubMed - in process]

From a quick skim, this is interesting!

Someone just e-mailed me to ask if I’ve encountered a meetings facility designed specifically/primarily with the medical/pharmaceutical industries’ needs in mind. It seems like I have, somewhere, sometime, but I can’t bring it to the front of my mind. If you know of such a thing, could you let me know?