Archive for October, 2009

CEJA

Monday, October 26th, 2009

In the last two years AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) CEJA has written an updated report on conflict of interest and CME funding. These, to date, have been rescinded by the AMA House of delegates. recently, CEJA has released its most updated version which will be reviewed and voted on at the next House of delegates meeting.

Please feel free to review all reports that will be presented to the House, but if you are interested in this specific report it appears on pages 1-14 of the attached.

CEJA Report

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Annual Fall SACME Meeting

Friday, October 16th, 2009

In 2 weeks the Annual Fall SACME meeting will be held in conjunction with the Annual AAMC meeting. This year’s meetings are in Boston. As the President-elect of SACME I help put together a session at the SACME meeting on current hot topics in the field. The line up can always change at the last minute, but at present include a diverse set of short presentations on topics like the upcoming IOM report on a CME Institute, ACCME changes mentioned in testimony before the Senate Ageing Committee, as well as a series of updates on things happening at MACY Foundation, Council for Medical Specialty Societies and others. I am also very excited to participate in a session on establishing a research focus in one’s CME office. Some innovative instructional design will be leverage during this session.
I have also been asked to speak at two additional sessions outside of the SACME meeting. I will be presenting on The Future of CME at the AMA Section on Medical Schools meeting and on CME as a Value Center at the Council of Deans session at the AAMC meeting. I am honored to have been asked to do either of these presentations and excited to be able to contribute in some small way to these important meetings.

The 2008 AAMC/SACME Harrison Survey

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The Change in CME Funding

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Although there has been a change occurring in commercial support funding for CME for several years now , with the release of the ACCME dataset for 2008 it can be consider official. In 2008 the total amount of commercial support fell on a year-to-date basis by 17% to $1.035 billion. However, if one reviews the data going back to 1998 a picture of change starting in 2004 with the release of the Standards of Commercial Support (revised SCS for 2004) comes into focus. From 1998 to 2004 the total amount of commercial support provided to accredited providers increased on average 27% per year. Since the SCS were established the amount of growth in any year has not exceeded 8% and in the last two years was 1% and then -17%. Although the data for 2009 is not yet available it is expected that a fall in total commercial support will again be realized and most experts believe the decrease will be even greater than that seen in 2008.

Graph, commercial support by year

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AHRQ Guides for Healthcare

Monday, October 5th, 2009

AHRQ offers numerous guides for health care. There are types of guides; research reviews, new research reports, and of interest to the busy clinicians should be the Effective Health Care guides which attempt to summarize information in clinically relevant domains in easy to read guides. These summarize the findings from large effectiveness studies done by evidence-based practice centers as well as rate the evidence from these projects. All of this is then presented in a manner that should help clinicians make decisions with their patients, especially since each guide typically has a companion guide for patients and their families.

Examples of topics covered in guides published in just the last 2 years include;

1. Comparing oral medications in adults with Type 2 diabetes
2. Choosing medications for adults with rheumatoid arthritis
3. Fracture prevention for postmenopausal women with osteoporosis
4. Treatments for clinically localized prostate cancer
5. Treatments for osteoarthritis of the knee
6. Caring for women during and after pregnancy

To gain access to these guides one can go to the AHRQ website or we have conveniently provided a link through this website on our resources and downloads page.

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