The Alliance for CME conference in San Francisco is going to be a great way to round out the month of January. There’s a lot I’m looking forward to, but I just added another item to my agenda after seeing this video post on Stephen Lewis’ blog about an organizing meeting for a coalition of people who want to educate legislators and the public about what continuing medical education actually is and does. I’ve been sensing there would be movement on this at some point in the near future after hearing lots of rumblings on this CME LinkedIn group, and Jan Perez’s great column on the need to advocate for CME in our January/February issue. I’m waiting to learn more about it, but this sounds mighty interesting to me…

In its latest e-newsletter, the Accreditation Council for CME said it’s going to be sending an e-mail to its accredited providers detailing how to enter data into the Program & Activity Reporting System (remember, your 2010 data has to be entered by March 31). PARS is the Web-based portal ACCME launched last year to make it easier to collect program and activity data from accredited providers. To help providers work the new system, the ACCME has scheduled a series of free webinars for February and March (here’s more info and how to register). The ACCME has has a slew of PARS educational resources on the PARS Help Page.

In other ACCME news:

Registration for the 2011 CME as a Bridge to Quality Accreditation workshops opens in February.

It sounds like the 2010 ACCME State/Territory Medical Society Conference: A Conference of Leaders, held December 15-16, in Chicago, was a big hit with participants. This capped off the ACCME’s intrastate accreditation outreach programs for the year, which also included four regional forums.