I’ve talked with a lot of people about the potential for social media in the emerging continuing professional development for healthcare professionals, and while everyone seems interested, I haven’t found many who have figured out what to do with it. Then today I ran across this example that just blew me away in the speech/language field (thanks to the good folks at SocialFish for the link! If you are interested in the type of open community described below, read their book, Open Community).

A speech and language therapist posts about how she wasn’t really getting into Twitter until she stumbled on someone related to the speech therapy field and began to see how she could get some value from those 140-character tweets as she grew her follow list. She says, “Most importantly I started to meet speech therapists/pathologists from all over the world. They were only a few at first, but this number started to gradually, then quickly increase over the next months. We shared our experiences, talked about our lives, our practices, patients, offered ideas, asked questions, and it made the community more real, more like a family. Here were these people all over the world who had never met, only sharing the same profession (or passion I would call it), coming together to talk, while waiting for a patient to show up, waiting in traffic, cooking dinner for family, even while in labour! This was the new face of speech therapy. Then Bob Bateman (@speechbob) showed his creative genius and came up with the term #slpeeps. This was a perfect description of us. Now any SLT(P) who joined twitter could use this hashtag to find us all, and we could use it to speak directly to our community.”

This group attracted the attention of its industry associations and organization, which she says “has contributed significantly to our professional development. We’re able to discuss topics of interest, share info on new research and resources, and we have somewhere to turn and bounce ideas off of when we have absolutely no idea what to do with a patient. It is guaranteed that if you present a case to the #slpeeps you will get some feedback, sometimes within minutes. SLPs-to-be are also an active part of the community, something I wish I had while in grad school.

And now they’ve created a “goal bank,” “shared resource links” page, and a “resource share” folder in Google Docs, which, she says, “is developing well and is already gaining worldwide recognition across SLT networks.”

Also, thanks to SocialFish for pointing out the fantastic Social Media Toolkit for Physicians, Office Staff and Patients, created by the Ohio State Medical Association. It’s a really useful resource for anyone in the healthcare arena who’s interested in social media.

The Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Association is looking for medical meeting and healthcare convention marketing experts, speakers, industry leaders and others with the expertise to educate healthcare convention marketing and exhibitions professionals to send in ideas for educational sessions for its 2011 Annual Meeting, June 25–28, at the Wynn Las Vegas. The theme is “No Limits to Learning,” and the submission deadline is December 13.

According to a press release, topics of particular interest include research on industry trends, updates on state and federal marketing legislation, budgeting, globalization, and results measurement. Proposed educational sessions should be targeted to healthcare convention and exhibit marketers, healthcare convention organizers and medical meeting planners.

You can download the form at the HCEA Web site.

I had it on my to-do list to write up my notes of the ACCME’s chief executive Murray Kopelow, MD’s excellent session at the Task Force meeting last month, but Thomas Sullivan beat me to it. Here’s his take on it, posted on Policy and Medicine: CME’s Role in Improving Healthcare.

According to an article in the current issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, while almost 84 percent of respondents to a survey said they had some sort of relationship with industry during the previous year, this is 12 percent fewer than was reported in 2004. The areas explored included drug samples, food and beverage, expense reimbursement for trips and CME activities, and speaker fees.

While there’s a fee to read the full paper, here’s a recap of some of the findings on DOTmed, and here’s USAToday’s take on it. John Mack over at the Pharma Marketing Blog had an interesting take. He notes the “sharp drop in % of physicians receiving payments for consulting, participation on speaker bureaus and advisory boards, and for enrolling patients in clinical trials. That percent decreased from 28% in 2004 to 14% in 2009.” In addition to the usual reasons for the drop—that organizations are cracking down on these relationships, and that it’s due to the physician payment disclosure requirements some pharma companies have to follow now due to legal settlements, and all will have to follow once the Sunshine Act fully kicks in–Mack thinks it might also have to do with “the decreasing number of new brand name drugs coming to market in last several years.”

The Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy piece of the FDA Amendments Act of 2007 , aka REMS, was a hot topic at the Task Force meeting last month. While it seems there may be a few wrinkles to work out, our columnist Stephen Lewis thinks it might end up being an area of opportunity for CME providers; others I spoke with weren’t so sure we could get past some of the potential conflicts they could involve. Here’s a YouTube video he posted recently about REMS:

What do you think? Are the issues insurmountable, or will REMS become part of the CME provider repertoire?

Here’s an interesting prognostication from Jane McGonigal, Director of game research/dev., Institute for the Future: “We’re going to see games around medical innovation, that doctors are going to play.” I think adding a gaming element to CME could be a fantastic idea — in fact, this reminds me of Tyson Greer’s GAME presentation on this exact topic.

What do you think — too frivolous-seeming for serious learning, or will HCPs latch onto it as an engaging, interesting way to learn?

It’s the day after we Americans went to the polls to decide who’s going to Congress and who’s going back to the drawing board. Like everyone else, I’ve got some serious campaign fatigue, having been bombarded with advertising about how horrible the other guy/gal is, how our country will basically implode if this person or that is elected. There has been so much misinformation, outright lying, and information taken out of context and spun 180 degrees that it’s hard to cut through it all to get to the truth of what all these candidates have actually said and done and stand for. But the main tenet of campaigning 101 seems to be that if you say something loudly and often enough, people will come to believe it. We see it happen every election cycle.

And we see it every time a story breaks that involves some sort of relationship between continuing medical education providers and industry. The difference is that, in politics, all sides mount their campaigns and flood the airways with their spin on the issues. When it comes to this industry, outside of the echo chambers that are our industry organizations and conferences and a few vocal exceptions, the only folks you see on the stump are those who vehemently oppose any collaboration between industry and healthcare professionals.

I hope that John Kamp, Executive Director of the New York-based Coalition for Healthcare Communication, is right with the prediction he gave at the opening of the National Conference of the Task Force on CME Provider/Industry Collaboration, held in October in Baltimore: “The heyday for the criticism of CME has peaked, and maybe passed.” If he’s right—which most I spoke with at the meeting hope for, even if most also didn’t believe that was the case—maybe it’s because the reasons for criticism are just starting to age out of eligibility for prime time attention. After all, most of the wrongdoing was done prior to stepped-up regulation by the organizations that accredit, represent, or govern industry and CME providers—and increased self-regulation. Maybe it’s because the total dollar amounts supporters are supplying to CME providers are dropping, according to the Accreditation Council for CME’s most recent data. Maybe the news media is just moving on to other juicy corporate targets for a while, although PrePublica’s splashy hit on physician/industry financial ties released just a week after the Task Force conference seems to belie the idea that Big Pharma isn’t still big fun to go after.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because we’re getting data about how commercial support actually doesn’t result in biased education. Could it be it’s because more CME activities are being able to demonstrate that physicians and other healthcare providers actually do learn how to care for patients better as a result of the activities?

Whether or not the criticism backs down, we have a lot of good stories to tell about how CME results in improvements in patient care. It’s time to start telling them—loudly and often.

So, what’s your story?