From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: A colleague just brought to my attention the June 2006 issue of Social Science and Medicine . This issue contains a special section on evidence-based medicine. Have a look at the abstracts and links for the section’s nine articles here.

All Evidence Based Health Care entries are here.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: From the December 2006 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine: Cooper RJ, Gupta M, Wilkes MS, Hoffman JR. Conflict of interest disclosure policies and practices in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. J Gen Intern Med 2006; 21(12):1248-1252.

OBJECTIVE: We undertook this investigation to characterize conflict of interest (COI) policies of biomedical journals with respect to authors, peer-reviewers, and editors, and to ascertain what information about COI disclosures is publicly available.

Read more here.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: I wonder how much more can be written on this topic? Here’s another article, from the November issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine:

Marco CA, Moskop JC, Solomon RC, Geiderman JM, Larkin GL. Gifts to physicians from the pharmaceutical industry: an ethical analysis. Ann Emerg Med 2006; 48(5):513-521. Link.

From me: Well, Anne, here’s at least one more, from Canada.com: Doctors warned to back away from freebie buffet.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: The November 2006 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings contains four articles that “exhibit the types of medical education research that must continue in the future if we are to further improve 21st century medical education and appropriately recognize innovations and innovators in the field”. Here is the editorial that describes these articles:

Habermann TM, Cascino TL. Education scholarship [editorial]. Mayo Clin Proc November 2006; 81 (11): 1423-1424.

Read more here. Or here, if the previous link doesn’t work.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Here’s what’s new in the literature:

New medical education journals

 

flawed NEJM MCQs

 

improved medical education teaching effectiveness

 

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

The journal Studies in Continuing Education has devoted two theme issues to researching in adult e-learning.

 

July 2006

 

November 2006



The journal is available by subscription only.

File this one in the duh department, but I guess it does still need to be said. A new study from Cutting Edge Information finds that:

Fewer than one quarter of pharmaceutical companies view attendance as a major concern for continuing medical education (CME) events. Only 23.5% of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies agreed that attendance was a significant challenge for their CME department. However, attendance is the one metric that all companies track and use to make critical investment decisions for future events…



Pharmaceutical companies must work with CME providers to develop outcomes measures that more accurately demonstrate an event’s

effectiveness. For example, interviewed CME executives said that when considering which CME events to sponsor, they look for providers that have a solid plan in place for recruiting. Pharmaceutical companies also rely on providers to perform peer mapping and to target audition definitions up front. Simply inviting masses of people is no longer acceptable, and companies prefer their providers to be as targeted and specific as possible with their audiences.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

From the October 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine:

 

Stern DT, Papadakis M. The developing physician - becoming a professional. N Engl J Med 2006; 355(17):1794-1799.

 

Read more here

 

Adult/Continuing Health Education Category here.

The North American Association of Medical Education and Communication Companies held a meeting before Wednesday’s National Task Force on CME Provider/Industry Collaboration conference sessions, and it was pretty interesting.

They presented results of a member survey NAAMECC conducted recently that dealt with commercial supporter/provider relations. Forty-five percent of respondents said that they occasionally had been asked by a commercial supporter within the past year for a review of CME activity content; 9 percent said it happens often. It’s a rare occurence for 27 percent, and 18 percent said they were never asked for a review. Of those who said they were asked, 27 percent said the supporter wanted to review the content for scientific accuracy; 9 percent said they wanted a medical/legal or regulatory review. Thirty-six percent said more than one of these, while 9 percent said it varies by supporter. No one was asked for an overall content review.

It was almost an even split between those who allow a supporter to do a medical/legal or scientific review of CME materials (45 percent), and those who said it depends on the situation (55 percent). None said they allow it only if manufacturers of all related products can review materials, too, or refuse to allow it altogether.

When asked what type of supporter is generally most compliant with separating education from promotion, big pharma got more than half the vote (small pharma, biotech companies, and device companies got no votes), while 45 percent said they are all about the same. When asked who was least compliant, small pharma won with 36 percent of the vote, followed by device companies at 27 percent. Another 36 percent said they were all about the same.

When they asked the crowd in the room if they have a formal review process, more than half said no. Fifty-seven percent said that commercial supporters do request reviews, and 27 percent said the accredited provider requests a review. In joint-sponsored activities, 70 percent of the audience said that accredited providers were responsible for deciding if changes were appropriate, with 27 percent giving that responsibility to the faculty/chair, and just 3 percent to the non-accredited joint sponsor.

The next question made me wonder if reviews might not be a bad idea: When asked if a commercial supporter has found a significant error on data or other content, 32 percent said yes, while 66 percent said no and 2 percent said they didn’t allow review. As to why commercial supporters want to review data, 72 percent said it was to ensure that the content adequately reflects the best available data; 14 percent said it was to ensure the data has been adequately reviewed; and 11 percent said it was due to ignorance of independence requirements of FDA and ACCME. Only 3 percent said it was to ensure bias in favor of the grantor, which was good to hear.

What are grantors’ greatest fears? Almost a quarter of the audience thougght it was about providers not carefully following ACCME, FDA, and OIG rules; 12 percent said a lack of ability to evaluate the value of programs to the company; and 2 percent each picked bad publicity and a lack of data on advancing patient care. More than half picked the famous “all of the above.”

But, as one person said, “These questions are all irrelevant because I have no contact with the grantor. I have no idea what they’re thinking. We’re talking about collaboration here, and it would be nice to have some communication with scientific, medical, education, and legal, instead of working in a vacuum.”

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

Here is a “perspective” just published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as links to the IOM’s publication on drug safety.