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.”

Today’s CMEChat on Twitter (held every Wednesday at 11 am Eastern) was a fun romp through what people do to prepare for a monster meeting like the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education’s (now called the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions).

Once we learned the conference’s Twitter hashtag (#acehp12) and how to pronounce ACEHP ( “a-sep,” according to one poster. “Think antiseptic”), and got an update on the weather forecast—“fluorescent and 70 degrees”—we dove into lessons learned/favorite experiences from past Alliance meetings. These included:

• Don’t feel you have to stay in a session that you’re not getting anything out of.

• Don’t worry about missing sessions in favor of hallway conversations. These conversations, and the relationships that can come out of them, are some people’s best conference experiences.

• It can be empowering to look around and realize how many others in the room are in the same boat as you.

• Keep an open mind. “Some of my best ideas came from conversations with people who disagree with me,” said one person. I can’t agree more.

• It’s great to be able to meet people we previously had only known virtually.

• Know that those who preach adult learning principles don’t always practice what they preach.

• Make dinner reservations ahead of time.

• Don’t let the faculty off the hook if they start glazing over the details. Be empowered as a learner.

When it comes to preparing, most are following @theCMEguy’s blog post suggestions, particularly going through the abstracts and making a list of first-, second-, and third-tier choices for each time slot; and setting up meetings. Being a bit of a techno-geeky group, we’re also loading up on apps, such as Tweetchat and Streamboard for meeting tweets, setting a time for an in-person tweetup (Monday at 6 pm), debating whether to tweet to the main #acehp12 hashtag or use the session-specific identifiers (use both as separate hashtags I believe was the consensus), and placing wagers on the total number of tweets to come out of the conference this year.

But just going through the abstracts doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get what you need. How do you find out which sessions may have sounded better on paper than in reality and vice versa? Some rely on the Twitter stream for thumb-ups and –downs. Others hover in the doorway before committing to a session. Others rely on tried-and-true presenters who they know will do a good session, though I personally am always torn between going to a session whose faculty I know is great and looking for the fresh voices and fresh ideas that this community needs to hear.

The sessions people are looking forward to most seemed to depend mostly on whatever their biggest challenges are, from performance-improvement CME to updates from the Accreditation Council for CME to anything to do with grants. The on-site technology help station also is getting some interest from folks, as are technology sessions. What we all hope to get out of the conference varied too, with one recently unemployed poster looking to network and the rest of us hoping to rustle him up a job. Others are looking to make new contacts, and learn more about MOC/MOL, future trends, grants, and technology.

Among our collective goals for this year’s conference?

* Spend at least one meal as a mentor and at least one meal as a mentee.

* Find new ideas, fresh voices, and better ways of doing things. Make connections, learn, speak, share.

* Spend at least one session sitting next to someone you’ve never met.

* Spend more time at meals downstairs than up in your room checking e-mail.

• Participate! Engage, share, be an active learner.

I hope to see you in Orlando!

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.

You know you’ve implemented some great ideas into your CME activities—why not get some recognition for your work? You have until September 9 to submit your application (which has been shortened from previous versions) for the Alliance for CME’s Member Sections Great Idea Awards.

You have a bit longer—until October 14—to get in your application for the Alliance’s Distinguished Member/Fellow Awards, which, says the Alliance, “are offered to members through numeric points accumulated for a variety of services within the association. The application can be downloaded and saved to your computer and is formatted to automatically calculate your points.”

Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum 2012

March 2012

Call for Presentations

Submission deadline: August 1, 2011

The Center for Business Intelligence and Medical Meetings are now accepting submissions for new workshops and sessions for the 8th Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum, March 2012 on the East Coast. Do you have an idea for a session that would help pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device meeting professionals, independent meeting management company personnel, and suppliers to the medical meetings industry better comply with relevant regulations or help them meet the other challenges they face? To be considered, the session must be free of commercial content and specific product endorsements.

Please include in your proposal the session’s goal or objective, primary audience, title, presenter names and bios, preferred format and length, and a 50-word description with three learner outcomes.

Submit your proposals to Brendan Emerson by August 1, 2012.

Want to know how to use social media effectively in CME? Free webinar today at 2 ET led by Brian McGowan and Joseph Kim. Come join us! If you can’t make it today, it will be available for viewing on demand. We’ll also be tweeting live at the #SoMeCME hashtag on Twitter.

I just put together this quick video slideshow of our Pharmaceutical Meeting Management Forum at animoto.com.

From the opening reception to the closing wrapup, it was pretty fabulous if I do say so myself. I’m still digging out from the meeting, but watch for more to come, including a video with Pfizer MEG’s Brian McGowan, PhD, who did a fantastic session on social media.

The economy may be on the upswing (that’s what they keep saying, anyway), but I know a lot of CME providers are still on the hunt for the right position. I know the Alliance for CME has added a pretty robust-looking CME career center to its Web site. Does anyone know of other job boards geared specifically toward those who work in continuing medical education? If so, please let me know. Thanks!

If you are interested in presenting at next year’s Alliance for Continuing Medical Education Annual Conference (January 26-29, 2011, at the San Francisco Marriott), don’t wait to get started on your educational abstract. The deadline to submit your complete abstract is March 19.

Here’s the call for abstracts link, and you can submit it online.

I don’t think it’d be possible to beat this year’s lineup, but I urge you to go ahead and try!

I don’t know if he was really going fast or if my brain was starting to clog up by the last session this afternoon, but I had a hard time keeping up with this one and know I can’t do it any kind of justice until the slides are available. There was just so much information packed into an hour that it was both ridiculous and sublime.

Basically, presenter Todd Dorman, MD, walked us through the reasons why CME has to be viewed as a value center, not a profit center, and how to go about doing it.

CME can’t be a profit center that is mandated to make a certain margin by year’s end because it can set an unconscious pressure to do things that will ensure you hit your fiscal goals, when you should be concentrating on educational goals. But CME departments often are viewed as profit centers anyway because they do, after all, bring in money (at some organizations, anyway). It’s up to you to change that around by identifying the value you provide to whoever is in charge of your organization, by showing CME to be a strategic and tactical lever to help your organization accomplish its mission.

Some possible ways to do that people at my table came up with were to show the impact on patient care, improvement in physician knowledge, impact on the organization’s brand, and even the financial benefit live activities bring to a destination in terms of hotel room nights, food and beverage expenditures, and taxes. The latter can be useful for the organization’s leaders when they’re working with local officials, and for a state or local organization, can be an important part of the organization’s actual mission. If you’re doing CME research, that can add to your value because it diversifies the research grant funds.

Once you collect data on what makes CME a value center to your organization, you have to be able to tell your story convincingly, passionately, and compellingly, he said. Touch the minds of your audience with data, but also touch their hearts by including stories of how your activities have impacted a physician on a personal level.

Other suggestions:

* Put the bulk of the data in handouts and keep the number of slides small

* Use key phrases (value, strategy, asset) repeatedly

* Use the opportunity to educate your leadership about your department, its policies and procedures, how it adds to the organization’s diversity, and other ways it supports the overall mission.