So says John Mack of the Pharma Marketing blog. Read all about what it is and how Mack highjacked the Sidewiki concept to illustrate his point.

Crowdsourcing and interactivity and the wisdom of the crowds is all well and good, but, as he so aptly shows, it may not be so good for your organization or your brand. And if you think it couldn’t happen to a CME provider, think again. Just another fun thing to worry about…

It’s not like it’s anything new, but for some reason this made the front page of the Boston Globe yesterday: 60 doctors took speaker fees from drug giant

The docs on the bureaus defend the practice, the medical centers are looking into the ethics of it all, etc., etc. What I find peculiar is that pharma companies are sending invitations to join to outspoken critics of the practice, such as Dr. Daniel Carlat, a Tufts University Medical School professor. While the Globe simply says that he declined, his blog posts about it make for some interesting reading (see posts here, here, and here).

Floyd Pennington thinks so. Read his thoughts on what a nationally accepted standard for the implementation of performance improvement CME initiatives could look like.

Looks like MECCs are taking another hit–check out this press release: GSK limits medical education funding to independent programs with highest impact on patient care. From the PR:

Starting in 2010, GSK will raise the bar and fund only independent medical education programs that are clearly designed to close gaps in patient care, and that demonstrate support for the optimal performance of healthcare professionals…

GSK will no longer fund CME by commercial providers including medical education and communication companies (MECCs) under the policy which takes effect immediately.

I sense the hand of my former editor and ACCME’s director of communications, Tamar Hosansky, in the new e-newsletter from ACCME called, not surprisingly, The ACCME Report (link goes to pdf download).

Among the topics in the first issue:

The ACCME Program & Activity Reporting System

ACCME Submits Additional Testimony to the Senate Special Committee on Aging (Someone remind me to add a link to this when our cover story, which so happens to be on the hearing this summer, goes online)

The 2009 Robert Raszkowski, MD, PhD, ACCME Hero Award winners–congratulations to George Mejicano, MD, MS; Ronald Murray, EdD; J. Brian O’Toole, PhD; and David Swee, MD

And a whole lot more. This is a great idea–I’ll look forward to seeing it in my in-box every third week of the month.

We’re so used to drug companies paying huge fines and settlements for misdeed when it comes to marketing their drugs that we don’t really think much (or at least I hadn’t until this morning) about whether or not these settlements do anything to deter future misbehavior. Check out Roy Poses’ argument that they don’t, from Healthcare Renewal. Interesting point of view. I’ll have to think on it some more, but my gut is that he’s right.

I’m off at a disgustingly early hour tomorrow to go to Chicago for the NIQIE conference. I was looking over the attendee list today and saw a few familiar names, so hopefully even having been out of the CME world for a few years, I won’t feel completely at sea.

Oh, who am I kidding? I always did find continuous performance improvement a difficult concept to grasp, at least in its details. Wish I could have made the pre-conference basics workshop, which was held today, but I had to get the magazine out first–mission accomplished, finally! But an overview would have been a good way to start it all off.

I hope to be able to post some news and updates from the conference, so stay tuned…

Just saw this on the CME LinkedIn group: AMA offers webinars on PI CME:

The American Medical Association has two upcoming webinar presentations about how and why CME providers are implementing Performance Improvement CME (PI CME) , and invite you to participate!

Contact: Mindi Daiga, 312-464-5196

Yup, that’s billion with a “b.” Biggest settlement ever for improper marketing practices. Here’s the story in the WSJ, though it’s everywhere today: Pfizer to Plead Guilty To Improper Marketing. Among the charges the settlement covers:

The fine also resolves allegations that Pfizer treated doctors to meals, paid them for speaking engagements and subsidized their travel to induce them to prescribe off-label uses for those four drugs and nine others.

Can we make this the last one of these stories I have to link to? C’mon, people, cut it out already.

From Policy and Medicine: University of Wisconsin CME: Dean Directs Sunshine on Journal Sentinel Attacks. It sounds like the university’s CME activities were called into question in recent editorials and articles in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel (see UW linked to ghostwriting, which begins, “As fears were growing about the link between hormone therapy and breast cancer, a drug company paid the University of Wisconsin to sponsor ghostwritten medical education articles that downplayed the risks, records obtained by the Journal Sentinel show,” and this editorial lauding the journalists efforts to uncover alleged wrongdoing).

Robert N. Golden, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and vice chancellor for medical affairs, fires back in this editorial: Academic integrity in UW’s CME program, where he explains,

An objective, unbiased assessment confirms that the academic integrity of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health’s Office of Continuing Professional Development is not in question. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, the nonpartisan organization that sets and monitors the standards for CME programs across the country, recently completed an independent inquiry, which was triggered by the Journal Sentinel’s first article about our CME activities.

The ACCME wrote that we had “implemented a careful and deliberate process to ensure that large amounts of commercial support do not in any way compromise the integrity of the university or the integrity of the continuing medical education program.”

We all need to do a better job of helping the media understand the safeguards we have in place exactly to keep what the Journal alleges from happening. They just don’t get it, all too often.

Thanks to the CME LinkedIn group for the pointer!