We don’t either, which is why Medical Meetings is conducting its first compensation survey. I’m really excited about finding out how compensation varies for different position titles and similar titles in different provider types, as well as seeing which sectors are growing, which are shrinking their staff, and how people ended up in this crazy field to begin with.

We will share highlights of the results in the January/February issue, and study participants who provide a valid e-mail address will receive the full data analysis upon request. I know it’s a little unnerving to talk about compensation, but the result will be worth it. And of course, your info will remain confidential; we’ll only use the data in aggregate.

It’ll only take about five minutes to complete. Please take the survey now! Thanks in advance for your participation.

From this article in the British Medical Journal, it sounds like AstraZeneca’s announcement that it will no longer pay for doctors to attend international conferences was part of a larger movement toward rethinking physician/industry relationships in Europe.

Key quote: “’I think sunshine in Europe is both desirable and inevitable,’ says Richard Bergstrom, head of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, the Brussels based industry trade body that represents companies across the EU. But he stresses the need to take into account the varied approaches and interactions between doctors and companies in different countries.”

That’s what Tom Sullivan predicts in this post: CME and the Health Care Economy Hospitals and Universities Cutting Back. He cites a decrease in state-accredited providers (the number of ACCME-accredited providers also having been heading downward in the past few years), saying that some organizations are dropping their accreditation due to cost and difficulty of maintaining accreditation these days.

But that’s not all. No, we also have state-funded academic medical centers such as the University of North Carolina School of Medicine closing down their CME shops because of state budget reductions, and shrinking budgets are causing hospitals to make some deep cuts that most likely will affect their CME offices.

There’s an interesting discussion of all this over at the CME LinkedIn group. Most seem to agree that there is in fact a constriction in the CME community, especially in hospitals where diminishing funds will go to direct patient-care functions at the cost of CME (I guess CME is marginally indirect?). It’s kind of strange that CME is viewed as something optional that can be, as one person said, put on the chopping block, but that’s not a new battle, is it?

Another posits that CME will continue to swing toward “ePub/internet/smart phone application-based” activities, though others worry that this will result in some pretty awful education that doesn’t actually do much to change behavior or improve patient health if we’re not careful to balance quality and cost. Others say we’ll continue to see a rise in joint sponsorship as more organizations drop their accreditation.

I don’t envision any way state-funded organizations, be they hospitals or academic medical centers, will be seeing any big funding increases in the near future—if they’re lucky, in this economy just staying even would be a feat. With commercial support also continuing to decline, no one that I’ve heard of stepping into the void to pay for the quality CME our HCPs deserve, and the number of accredited providers dropping as well, it’s going to be a challenge to find ways to keep docs continually developing professionally.

I think I’ll dress as a budget cutback this Halloween. Way scarier than a zombie, don’t you think?

During this week’s #CMEchat on Twitter, I wondered if we could use some gamification elements to encourage healthcare professionals to engage in followup activities. I don’t know about you, but I find activities with gaming elements pretty addictive, and I bet most of your HCPs do, too.

So I was interested in reading this post by Alyce Kuklinski, MSN, ANP, on Pri-Med’s Off the Chart blog on “edutainment” and game-based educational formats. It sounds like Pri-Med is tip-toeing into using them, and why not? I remember going to an awesome session on just this topic at GAME a year or so ago, and wondering why more CME providers weren’t experimenting with the concept. Or maybe you are? If so, I’d love to learn what you’re doing and how.

Maybe the Alliance for CME will lead the charge and try some gamification on its own? Derek has some (pretty funny, I think) suggestions on how they can get started with an after-hours Outcomes Pecha Kucha game…

Update: I was just reminded by @CMEadvocate via Twitter than gamification elements can get corny quickly, and, as I noticed at the EventCamp Twin Cities hybrid conference this summer, they also can be pretty distracting.

If you’ve done it successfully, I’d love to know what worked (and what didn’t), and how you went about figuring out what your specific learners would find compelling. As always, I’d love to hear from you via a comment here, e-mail, or even (gasp!) by phone—978-448-0377.

I kept forgetting to bring my camera, but I did finally remember to get a few shots on the last day of the National Task Force on CME Provider/Industry Collaboration conference (click to enlarge the thumbnail photos).

Douglas Henley, MD, FAAFP, with the American Academy of Family Physicians, gave the Shickman Lecture: Collaborating for Advances in Professional Education and Patient-Centered Care. He talked about the cacophony of information, guidelines, and data healthcare providers have to contend with, and how med ed professionals can get their attention. For example, he said CME providers should rally behind—and deliver their activities via—plug-and-play, cost-effective healthcare information technology. He also talked about the need for team-based, patient-centered care, and publicly available reporting of conflicts of interest, physician knowledge, treatment options, etc.

I particularly liked this quote: “CME providers can help clinicians understand it’s always going to be a journey, and targets will always be moving. But there are measures that matter. We need to pay attention to the disease states that are most important to healthcare today.”

He also spent some time talking about how social factors, education, law enforcement, agriculture, and environmental policy all equal health policy, since they are all important factors in healthcare. (I’m not sure I bought all of his arguments on this one, especially when he talked about education levels’ correlation with poverty, violence, obesity, smoking, etc.—they’re correlated, but does less education cause these things? I don’t think he made his case.)

Anyway, it was a thought-provoking talk. Which was followed with a panel discussion led by John Kamp, PhD, JD, with the Coalition for Healthcare Communication.

Kamp led Henley and David Hoyt, MD, American College of Surgeons, and Dave Davis, MD, FCFP, Association of American Medical Colleges, in a discussion of where we are and where we’re going. Among the current challenges:

Moving from didactic to using any and all formats that will help docs learn

Moving from physician-centered to team-based activities

Moving from therapeutic-centered topics to prevention, screening, and non-clinical patient treatment

Moving education from the ballroom to workplace learning

Moving from butts-in-seats outcomes to performance and patient health outcomes

Moving from traditional commercial support financial model to more pluralistic models that have all healthcare organizations contributing to CME financing

Moving from CME being a standalone to CME being integrated into the entire organization

Hoyt talked about a surgeon-specific system of educational peer review that allows the surgeons to track their own standings and assess their practices. All in all, it was a good panel discussion, and Kamp kept it on track and provocative.

Here are a few shots from the exhibit area:

On the left is Alexis Weinstein, Healthmatters CME, Colleen Filak, MS, CCMEP, Concordia Healthcare Education (whose tweets I have been enjoying for a while but I hadn’t met her until this conference), and Audrie Turnow, CCMEP, Paradigm Medical Communications, who wrote a great column for Medical Meetings last year on how to beat the post-con blues (i.e., how do you actually do something with what you learned once you’re back in your real life).

Paul Paul Piché, BSc, MBA, and Martin Robert, PhD, HIT Global Inc. (Piché is also president of the board of the Global Alliance for CME, which he said is holding its 2012 meeting in Toronto the day before the 2012 CME Congress.)

Last but by no means least, here are Wendy Turrell, DrPh, CCMEP, Aspire Health Consulting, Debrah Fisher, Alliance for CME, and Mila Kostic, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine