Now here’s an opportunity: The Department of Health and Human Services is looking for innovations that can provide quality care while reducing costs, and is launching a $1 billion program to do it. Called the Health Care Innovation Challenge from the CMS Innovation Center and underwritten by the Affordable Care Act, the Challenge “will award grants to applicants who will implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care, and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, particularly those with the highest health care needs.”

With awards ranging from $1 million to $30 million over three years and a goal of identifying new models of workforce development—including the training and education needed to support those new models—CME needs to get in on this one. Deadline to submit a Letter of Intent is December 19, 2011.

Details here.

“We have decided that we will no longer pay for doctors to attend international scientific and medical congresses but will instead focus our educational efforts on local educational opportunities for healthcare professionals,” said AstraZeneca chief executive David Brennan at a conference in Istanbul in May, according to a Reuters report. This makes the drug firm the first to drop the practice of financially assisting foreign physicians who want to attend medical congresses outside of their home countries.

The reason Brennan gave for the policy change is that the company wanted to ensure that it didn’t do anything that could be perceived to be a bribe to get an HCP to prescribe its products, according to the article. The pharma industry has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent years, something that has further intensified when it comes to cross-border meetings due to investigations triggered by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the U.K.’s new Bribery Act, which is expected to go into effect in July.

Given this environment, Richard Bergstrom, director general of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, told Reuters that he anticipates other companies may well follow suit.

What do you think about AstraZenica’s decision to stop funding foreign physician travel to meetings? Will it significantly affect attendance at large U.S.-based meetings? Do you expect other companies will in fact follow suit?

Please leave a comment below, or e-mail some thoughts. I’m thinking that, if a lot of companies do follow AstraZenica’s lead, it could put a world of hurt on some of our large national medical association conferences. Not to mention that it would cut off a fairly major source of education for physicians, especially those who come from countries where CME is not as prevalent or well-policed for bias as it is in the U.S.

There was a familiar face at TEDx Maastricht, the European gathering for bright ideas, bold thinkers, and innovators in medicine and healthcare: Lawrence Sherman, who in addition to writing a column for Medical Meetings is a regular speaker at CME conferences. Check it out:

I like what he’s saying—and that the topic of CME was represented at this conference.

I just now heard that Debra Gist, MPH, FACME, one of my favorite CME specialists — who also happens to run one of the best CME blogs around — has been hired as the new director of education with The American Academy of Dermatology. Congratulations to the AAD, and to Debbie!

Just got a press release announcing the North American Association of Medical Education and Communication Companies‘ new officers and board members, who took their new positions at the American Medical Association’s Task Force on Industry/Provider Collaboration, held in Baltimore last week.

The New NAAMECC Board Officers are:

President: Sandra Weaver, MS

President Elect: Chris Bolwell, BSc

Past President: Stephen M. Lewis, MA, CCMEP

Treasurer: Linda Coogle, MBA, CCMEP

Newly elected NAAMECC Board Members are:

Kurt Boyce

Lea Ann Hansen, PharmD

Joseph Kim, MD, MPH

Looks like MECCs are taking another hit–check out this press release: GSK limits medical education funding to independent programs with highest impact on patient care. From the PR:

Starting in 2010, GSK will raise the bar and fund only independent medical education programs that are clearly designed to close gaps in patient care, and that demonstrate support for the optimal performance of healthcare professionals…

GSK will no longer fund CME by commercial providers including medical education and communication companies (MECCs) under the policy which takes effect immediately.

From Policy and Medicine: University of Wisconsin CME: Dean Directs Sunshine on Journal Sentinel Attacks. It sounds like the university’s CME activities were called into question in recent editorials and articles in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel (see UW linked to ghostwriting, which begins, “As fears were growing about the link between hormone therapy and breast cancer, a drug company paid the University of Wisconsin to sponsor ghostwritten medical education articles that downplayed the risks, records obtained by the Journal Sentinel show,” and this editorial lauding the journalists efforts to uncover alleged wrongdoing).

Robert N. Golden, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and vice chancellor for medical affairs, fires back in this editorial: Academic integrity in UW’s CME program, where he explains,

An objective, unbiased assessment confirms that the academic integrity of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health’s Office of Continuing Professional Development is not in question. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, the nonpartisan organization that sets and monitors the standards for CME programs across the country, recently completed an independent inquiry, which was triggered by the Journal Sentinel’s first article about our CME activities.

The ACCME wrote that we had “implemented a careful and deliberate process to ensure that large amounts of commercial support do not in any way compromise the integrity of the university or the integrity of the continuing medical education program.”

We all need to do a better job of helping the media understand the safeguards we have in place exactly to keep what the Journal alleges from happening. They just don’t get it, all too often.

Thanks to the CME LinkedIn group for the pointer!

I know I’m really late in posting this link, but I just wrote an article about it last week and didn’t get around to watching it until then. So, with no further ado, check out this videocast of the Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing from late July, called Medical Research and Education: Higher Learning or Higher Earning?, starring ACCME’s own Murray Kopelow, MD, among other illustrious folks. I don’t know how he kept his cool after hearing ACCME get bashed repeatedly during the first panel’s testimony, particularly that of Steven Nissen, MD, Chairman, Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Cleveland Clinic. I mean, really, he actually said, to Dr. Kopelow’s face, that “Maybe [ACCME doesn’t] have resources, maybe they do not have the will. We need ACCME to go away.”

The problem the pro-commercial support people had (and I call them that for a lack of a better term) is that they threw either a lot of anecdotes or a lot of data, but not the kind of sound bites legislators can hear, digest, and understand. I’m not saying our elected officials are incapable of understanding all the nuances of accredited CME and its financial support system, just that they don’t have the time or the inclination to parse every tiny bit of it the way you and I do. I hope they do go through the reams of info Dr. Kopelow put in his written testimony (also available for download here, with everyone else’s as well), but I doubt it. The whole hearing seemed stacked against commercial support from the get-go to me.

I am so proud and happy to announce that Tamar Hosansky, editor, Medical Meetings magazine, has been selected to receive a 2007 President’s Award from the Alliance for CME, the international association of continuing medical education professionals. The award, which will be presented at the Alliance for CME’s annual conference in January 2007 in Phoenix, is in recognition of her leadership and educational contributions to the Alliance as editor of Medical Meetings.

This is so incredible—please join me in congratulating her!

Check it out: CME Linkages, written by CME consultant Debra Gist. I think it’s off to a great start, with several intriguing posts. Can’t wait to see what she does with it.