Lesley Bainbridge, BSR (PT), Med, PhD, with the University of British Columbia, gave an interesting keynote on teaching interprofessional collaboration in healthcare, a hot topic for a few years now. She started out with a not-shocking-but-nonetheless-horrifying statistic: 70 percent to 80 percent of medical errors are caused by poor communication and collaboration among healthcare teams. That may be because HCPs learn by doing in the clinical setting, although, she pointed out, most know more about collaboration than we tend to give them credit for.

She talked a lot about various competency frameworks, and the similarities (many) and differences (few) between those developed by U.S. and Canadian organizations. She also provided a fairly daunting list of challenges for interprofessional education, from stereotyping to time, geography (we both have big countries), to resources, power/hierarchy issues, political will, unions, professional regulators, and policies that don’t support team-based approaches.

She says she wants to “put the ‘I’ back in teamwork,” meaning that people need to take personal responsibility for examining what stops us from collaborating effectively as practitioners. What barriers do you face? She gave us several areas to think about:

* Social capital: Basically, this is about trust and respect. How do you build these among colleagues and team members? How do you lose them? Are there “teachable moments” in everyday interactions you can take advantage of to build trust and respect?

* Rhetoric: The words we choose can make all the difference in an interaction. She suggested practicing word choice in e-mail, since it has a built-in time delay you don’t get in conversation. What words do you use? Does a disregard for grammar and spelling indicate a disregard for the recipient? Think about it.

* Perspective taking: Remember, her colleague told her, it’s not all about you (what??). How do you figure out where another person is coming from? How can you teach others to discover others’ perspectives? This one is particularly sticky, I think.

* Negotiate priorities: How do you work with others to determine what’s important and what isn’t?

* Resolving conflicts: How do you create a safe place to have conversations around areas of conflict?

* Building relationships: How do we build relationships, and how do we teach people to build constructive relationships with colleagues?

How did I get so behind in posting about this conference so fast? I’m sitting in the general assembly ballroom waiting for Monday’s keynote to begin and I haven’t even gotten to yesterday’s yet! So this is going to be sketchy, but Louis Diamond, MD, president of Quality Healthcare Consultants was thought-provoking in his talk about how all the pieces of the national performance improvement movement are starting to come into alignment just as aspects of the healthcare reform act call for performance and quality improvement that require an overhaul of the system. CME providers, he said, are in the right place at the right time to make a difference. especially as the health information technology (HIT) piece is becoming rapidly integrated into the improvement agenda, which also just so happens to include CME/CPD.

He set the stage by citing just how bad it is in the U.S. (32 percent of patients say they’ve experienced medical and/or lab errors, more than a slew of other countries he listed, and our readmission rates are pretty dismal). And costs are seriously out of control: U.S. salaries have increased 38 percent over the past 10 years, while healthcare costs have soared 131 percent. If milk had that inflation rate, it would cost $48 per gallon. Yikes, anyone! While the cost of care in the U.S. is double that of other Western nations, they’re also experiencing ridiculous (my word, not his) healthcare inflationary rates.

But while things like healthcare reform, CMS’ PQRS, Maintenance and Certification and likely soon, Maintenance of Licensure, and ARRA and HITECH, and other acronyms I think I missed as we whizzed through the slides, are aligning, there are still misalignments, he said.

Quoting Don Berwick, he said, “You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it repeatedly,” meaning that while it’s great we’ve put work into measurement and reporting, it’s now time to focus on improvement.

Among his recommendations:

* Get to know the national performance improvement initiatives (NQF, NPP, etc.) Join them.

* Adopt NQF and NPP recommendations as a framework for what you do.

* Facilitate national and local discussions between measurement improvement groups, CPD groups, and HIT groups. As he said, the other two groups already are starting to come together, and “You need to get into the dance.”

Outgoing president George Mejicano kicked things off at the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions annual meeting with a quick walk-through of the work that ACEHP has done in the past year. In addition to changing its name (Mejicano revealed a new logo with the wave of a Harry Potter-inspired magic wand) and enacting a new bylaw that allows two new members to join the board, the new national disclosures system is on schedule for rollout this year, and the Alliance is also gearing up to launch a research institute. Another change for 2012, though not quite as happy a change as far as I’m concerned, is that Paul Weber, who has done an outstanding job as the Alliance’s executive director, is retiring in May. I hope to catch up with Paul this afternoon and get some of his thoughts on his time with the organization, so more on that later.

Gabrielle Kane, president of the Society for Academic CME, then took to the stage to talk about the “family reunion” feeling of working with ACEHP, with the support of a healthy grant from Pfizer specifically aimed at improving research in CME. She outlined the SACME research agenda, which is based on two main projects at this point: A literature review to identify gaps and guide new research; and a taxonomy project. She invited Alliance members to participate in both.

My first full day at the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions annual conference, going on now in Orlando, was packed. Some notes on the meeting as a meeting.

I’ll get the whining out of the way first:

-Yes, I already have stuffed-brain syndrome from having way too much thrown at me in too little time with no connection between session topics and no time for reflection built in.

-We hit the “I know you can’t read this slide, but…” wall before the first general session was over.

-We hit the “I know this classroom setup makes it almost impossible to break into small groups, but we’ll have to do our best…” shortly thereafter.

-Healthy food is good, but replacing the chips with bean salad and the cookie with an apple in the bag lunch seems a bit over the top. Must we resort to Starbucks for all our dietary sins?

-Speaking of over the top, is it just me, or are there way too many sessions to choose from? I know, tough problem to have, but I’m finding myself torn between six or seven I want to go to in every single time slot. It’s making me crazy to be missing so much good content (and hearing people tweet about some of those sessions to the #acehp12 hashtag just makes it worse).

Awesome aspects, meeting-wise:

-Free WiFi! Thanks to Bernie Halbur, PhD, FACME, ACEHP’s Professional Development & Meeting Management Director, for making it happen, along with everything else we’re enjoying logistically. I gave her a standing ovation when she was recognized yesterday at the general session, and I wasn’t the only one.

-Love having the brief outdoor breezeway walk to the exhibition area, and the tables set up for eating/hanging out/computing along the way. At least we’re assured of the opportunity to catch five minutes or so of the gorgeous Florida weather as we go back and forth, instead of never even knowing if the sun is shining or not, as so often happens at marathon meetings.

-Beautiful hotel (the JW Marriott), beautiful rooms, nice jogging path, great fitness center. I don’t know much about golf, but the course looks good to me.

-Being able to hold the new CCMEP celebration out on the patio last night was a wonderful touch. Again, being able to get outside in January means a lot, especially to those of us who hail from the frozen North!

(Cross-posted on face2face.)