From the Alliance for CME Connection:

Effective November 30th, national and state accredited providers no longer need to submit the “International Activity Request Form” to receive approval for providing AMA PRA Category 1 Credit to physicians not licensed in the United States. This policy change, approved by the AMA’s Council on Medical Education, allows accredited providers to award Category 1 credit to domestic and international physicians without additional designation language on promotional materials or certificates. The new AMA PRA booklet, scheduled for publication in early 2006, will reflect this change.



For more information, please contact Rebecca DeVivo or Marilyn Maldonado.

If you weren’t able to attend the Industry/Provider Collaboration Task Force meeting, here’s my writeup of it. I hadn’t heard so much MECC bashing in a long time, but it was pretty lively, with lots of good discussion. Now I’m just waiting to see what, if anything, results from all that discussion.

From a press release:

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) today announced its premier annual meeting — Scientific Assembly — will be held in New Orleans next year. Saying that emergency physicians were among the first to respond to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Dr. Rick Blum, president of ACEP, said it was important for them to be among the first to return.



Scientific Assembly 2006 will be held October 15-18, in the Central Business District and the French Quarter. During the event, more than 3,500 emergency physicians from across America and 30 countries around the world learn the latest advancements in lifesaving emergency care, debate clinical controversies and discuss the challenges facing their ability to provide care, such as overcrowding, staffing shortages, and the medical liability insurance crisis.




“Scientific Assembly will provide jobs for the residents of New Orleans to help them rebuild their lives,” said Dr. Blum. “It also will provide needed tax revenue to help the city reestablish critical community services, where ACEP members, such Dr. Jim Aiken and Dr. Peter DeBlieux of Charity Hospital, courageously represented emergency medicine to the nation.”

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey: I thought this article from the AMA might be of general interest -

Resolving conflict of interest. CPPD Report 2005; 17(Fall):1-2.

Excerpt: The American Medical Association’s (AMA) CPPD report is usually the forum to discuss what’s new with the AMA PRA credit system. In this article, however, we thought it would be helpful to share our experience as an accredited provider navigating the resolution of conflict of interest (COI). As with all accredited providers, we have had to find a way to identify and resolve COIs in order to comply with the ACCME’s Standards for Commercial Support (SCS). We offer our experience as one more example that may prove useful to other providers.

Our first step was to upgrade our disclosure form by shifting its focus to identify only the financial relationships that were truly relevant according to the new definition, and in relation to the content. We were thus easily able to make our disclosure form a more accurate and useful screening tool for identifying potential COIs. However, we then faced the larger question that all accredited providers are grappling with: once identified, how do we actually resolve potential conflicts?

Full text (PDF)

I just finished writing up the AAFP-No Free-Lunch flap up for the December issue of Medical Meetings, but this Times article has a pretty good outline of the whole gifts-to-physicians issue. Here’s their bit about No Free Lunch and AAFP:

A kerfuffle at a meeting of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) in September highlighted a growing perception of conflict of interest between doctors and the corporate world. The activist organization No Free Lunch, which urges physicians to refuse all gift offers, was initially barred from an exhibit hall where corporate sponsors, including consumer-product companies and drugmakers, would be offering giveaways galore. After a deluge of calls from angry AAFP members, the academy eventually allowed No Free Lunch to set up a booth as well.

When I spoke with AAFP executive vice president Douglas Henley, MD, about it last week, he was refreshingly forthright about the whole thing. He said that he had made a snap decision, based on hearing about how the group had acted up at other industry meetings (they are reported to have brought in an undercover journalist to tape the exhibition in 2001, for example), but after speaking with Bob Goodman, MD, No Free Lunch’s leader, he was convinced that they would abide by the AAFP exhibitor rules. Which they did, for the most part.

While I hold what No Free Lunch is doing in very high regard, they do have to obey the rules, just like everyone else. But I do thoroughly enjoy the snarky news reports they put out. It’s tough for organizations these days to balance the perceptual issues, I would think, of exhibits and sponsorships—lucrative, informational, and educational as they may be—living alongside their purely educational programming. Even with a strong line drawn between the two, it makes people nervous enough that they don’t want TV cameras on the show floor.

There’s only a week or so left before the Oct. 21 deadline on Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Association’s call for speakers for its 2006 annual meeting, to be held June 24-27, in Fort Lauderdale. So if you have any great ideas for healthcare convention and exhibition marketing professionals, give them a call at (404) 252-3663, or get a copy of the official curriculum form at the HCEA Web site.

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

There are some items on the Web site that you may be interested in, and you can link to them from the What’s New in SACME page:

There are several new issues to view on the News for Medical & Adult Educators page:

AAMC Reporter

ABMS Record

Analysis in Brief

Cochrane News

Focus on Surgical Education

Medical Meetings

NLM Technical Bulletin

Some interesting stuff in the latest issue of WentzMiller and Associates’ WM&A Global CME e-newsletter. First up:

WentzMiller has joined forces with Mediworld USA, Healthways and the Global Alliance for Medical Education to publish more than 1 million guides to prevent infection from contamination for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. State Health Departments in Lousiana, Mississippi and Alabama will distribute these to doctors, paramedics and the general public We need your (tax deductible) contribution. Send check made out to GAME to Fred Clarke, Dowden Health Media, 110 Summit Ave., Montvale NJ 07645. Thanks!

There’s also some interesting items on mandatory CME from the German and Swedish perspectives, the growing pressure to measure CME performance in the U.S., and the changing CME rules in Italy, to name just a few. The current issue isn’t up on their Web site yet, but check back often. Or sign up–it’s a great resource, especially for those interesting in international CME issues.

This article from MedPage Today has a good run-down of some of the scrambling medical association meetings that were scheduled for New Orleans are having to do post-Katrina.

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

From the October 2005 issue of the International Journal for Quality in Health Care:

Lorenz KA, Ryan GW, Morton SC, Chan KS, Wang S, Shekelle PG. A qualitative examination of primary care providers’ and physician managers’ uses and views of research evidence. Int J Qual Health Care 2005; 17(5):409-414.

Objectives. To examine the reasons and search strategies related to physicians’ search for evidence and to compare clinician and physician manager approaches.

Design. Qualitative analysis of verbatim transcripts of four focus groups in 2002.

Study setting. Clinicians and managers in community practices in Southern California.

Participants. Pediatricians, family practitioners, and general internists (i.e. child and adult primary care providers) in non-academic practice and physician managers whose primary responsibility involved making management decisions within a moderate to large sized health care delivery system (e.g. health plan, community hospital, large group practice).

Main outcome measures. Themes related to clinician and manager reasons for using evidence and approach to selecting among evidence sources.

Results. Clinicians and managers differed substantially in their reasons for using evidence. Whereas clinicians consistently invoked clinical intuition as a guide to most routine clinical decisions, managers articulated both motivation and interest in using medical research to guide decision-making, most commonly prompted by cost. Both clinicians and managers rated trustworthiness as a paramount consideration in arbitrating between evidence sources, because neither group evinced comfort with the complexity of primary literature. Both groups expressed a preference for tested, convenient, and respected evidence sources such as expert colleagues and professional societies.

Conclusions. Because clinicians invoke intuition in confronting the challenges of daily practice, evidence-based medicine interventions that target managers are likely to have larger effects on health outcomes than those that target primary care providers and individual patient treatment. Ensuring trustworthiness of evidence is of the utmost importance. Because both groups express discomfort with the format of primary evidence sources, strategies should probably not rely on individual appraisal.

Journal abstract link