From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: This book by Richard Gunderman was just reviewed in the November 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. I looked around and found some more reviews of the book:

Gunderman, Richard B. Achieving Excellence in Medical Education, New York: Springer, 2006.

Read more here

All book reviews here.

According to the New York Times, the new head of Pfizer plans to lay off almost 2,400 of its sales force. Could this be good news for CME funding, or just an overall cutback now that they don’t have quite as much to sell as they used to? The article also says that other companies likely will follow suit. We’ll have to wait and see…

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: A colleague just brought to my attention the June 2006 issue of Social Science and Medicine . This issue contains a special section on evidence-based medicine. Have a look at the abstracts and links for the section’s nine articles here.

All Evidence Based Health Care entries are here.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: From the December 2006 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine: Cooper RJ, Gupta M, Wilkes MS, Hoffman JR. Conflict of interest disclosure policies and practices in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. J Gen Intern Med 2006; 21(12):1248-1252.

OBJECTIVE: We undertook this investigation to characterize conflict of interest (COI) policies of biomedical journals with respect to authors, peer-reviewers, and editors, and to ascertain what information about COI disclosures is publicly available.

Read more here.

According to this press release, Pri-Med has completed an enormous outcomes study that found that 99 percent of those surveyed said they were using the education they received to “change or refine their approach to patient care” six weeks post-CME. Here’s more:

The study also includes a wealth of information on specific disease states. For instance, within the Diabetes (Insulin Therapy) therapeutic category, solo practitioners were able to recognize the greatest educational gain (16 percent), and those in practice five or less years seemed more receptive to the information from the educational activity than their older colleagues (26%).

More from the release:

The study includes feedback from nearly 50,000 medical professionals who participated in 893 live clinical sessions in 2005. The study includes data covering 48 therapeutic areas including asthma, diabetes, stroke, heart failure, depression and erectile dysfunction.

I don’t know about you, but I’m itching to get my hands on that data!

The Alliance for Continuing Medical Education in conjunction with the

Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education is putting on a

live webinar on “ACCME‘s Revised Accreditation Model and Updated Accreditation Criteria” on November 20 at 2 p.m. ET, and again on November 27 at the same time. To register, click here , click on Professional Development and Educational Opportunities and follow the link for Upcoming Webinars. The Alliance also says:

Each ACCME accredited provider is entitled to ONE complimentary registration on November 20 or 27, paid by the ACCME. To receive this discount, please click Non-Member and then enter the ACCME Provider ID in the Registration Discount Code box on the Check Out page. Additional registrations may be purchased.

The speaker, of course, will be Murray Kopelow, MD, Chief Executive of the ACCME. Bruce Bellande, PhD, of the Alliance for CME will

moderate.

The Medical Science Liaison Institute is organizing its first “Executive Program” in the spring of 2007 through a newly established MSL University. The meeting is open to senior-level pharma executives, including VPs, directors, and managers. The topic is focusing on field based medical teams. According to organizer Jane Chin, Ph.D. president of the MSL Institute, the event was developed for executive-level medical directors who interface with medical education, R&D, marketing, and other pharma functions in their field medical efforts.

Here’s an interesting perspective from AMed News: Virginia law school gives doctors new perspective on liability litigation.

Richard Rosenthal, MD, is passionate about the importance of understanding medical liability law, a transformation that took place while attending a novel six-session course offered by the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia.



The school gives practicing physicians a chance to attend legal lectures with law students — and earn up to 27 continuing medical education credits — for participating in the Saturday classes, “Medical Malpractice Law and Litigation.” A lineup of guest speakers, including plaintiff attorneys, especially adds to the doctors’ experience.

Sadly, the need for this type of education is likely to continue growing, isn’t it?

Check this one out from the Annals of Internal Medicine: Pay-for-Performance and Accountability: Related Themes in Improving Health Care. From the article:

Advocates of pay-for-performance believe that physicians can improve their performance. To do so, many will need to acquire additional knowledge and skills. The record shows that physicians who have been in practice for a long time have worse average scores on various measures of quality; they may be apt targets for educational initiatives (27).



This need for learning presents a remarkable opportunity for medical schools, postgraduate training programs, continuing medical education credit-granting programs, medical and specialty societies, and certifying boards. The recent trend toward requiring performance assessment to maintain one’s specialty board certification might serve as a basis for certifying boards or specialty societies to collect the performance measures that pay-for-performance programs would use. The utility of these professional databases to serve these 2 purposes may be limited because health plans require data on current performance and some certification programs measure performance at 10-year intervals. In fact, performance data may flow to the certification programs, which will reduce reluctant collection burdens for physicians.

The good news, for me, is that I just got a promotion—I will be the new editor of Association Meetings, a magazine I have always found to be fascinating, in a field that’s also fascinating. So many new things to explore!

While I’m really excited about the news, I’m also sad, because this means I will have to leave my job with Medical Meetings. I love the CME world, and the people who live in it, and I will miss it and you all horribly. I can’t begin to say how much. But a new world beckons, and I have to move on. I only hope that the association planners I will be serving will be as wonderful as you all have been to me. While my focus will be changing, I still plan to keep up to date on what’s happening in CME, and I still plan to go to the Alliance for CME meeting in January.

Thank you for everything, and I hope to see you there.