Hopkins CME Blog

Johns Hopkins certified CME activities do not include presentations from individuals serving on Speaker’s Bureaus. Allow me to elucidate.

A few years ago, Johns Hopkins passed a new policy that defined a specific type of speaker’s bureau and banned our faculty from participating in such an activity. The definition of a speaker’s bureau is important because it’s the construct of the expected relationship with a commercial entity that is important. Furthermore, if we simply banned speaker’s bureaus, the world could simply start to call them something different. The Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine Policy on Speaking for Industry

Importantly, the policy stated that participation in such an activity was felt to be unprofessional. The speaker in such an activity is actually an employee of the commercial interest and as such utilizes materials fully prepared by that interest or at a minimum utilizes materials in which the speaker does not have the final editorial determination. Some individuals refer to this as ghost presenting.

About a year and half after the above policy went into effect for Hopkins faculty, OCME implemented an extension of said policy such that no faculty of a certified CME activity should be a member of a speaker’s bureau. We allowed time for the implementation as many activities are planned far in advance of their launch date. That policy is now in effect for all activities organized through our office with the only exception explained below.

As Johns Hopkins expands, OCME may become the accredited provider for additional facilities joining the health system. As we do, we will again permit a phase in-period for this policy to take effect for only those activities principally orchestrated in partnership with a specific new health system entity. The phase will not be longer than a year and we will work with any of these new entities to achieve full compliance even sooner if possible.

Ultimately all certified CME offered by Johns Hopkins will avoid individuals who participate in speaker’s bureaus. OCME remains fully dedicated to high-quality evidence-based education that meets or exceeds all established standards.

Did you know that you could view your CME credit records from our website? By logging in to this site, you can access 6 years of your JHU CME credit records.

To login, use the email address we have on file (the one you provided at registration), and your password. IF you don’t know your password, you can click the “forgot your password?” link under the password box and it will be emailed to you.

Once you log in, click the link on the left hand side of the screen labeled “Transcripts/Certificates”

A listing will pop up of courses you have credit records for, along with links to print your certificates for each one.

If you don’t see all your credits, we may have multiple records for you on file. This happens when we get different spellings or forms of your name (like Jerry on one registration and Gerald on another), or different email addresses (a gmail account and a hopkins account for example).

Don’t worry, we can merge them together, to get you a complete transcript. Just send us an email to cmetechsupport@jhmi.edu and let us know that you think your records are incomplete, and let us know if you use a different email address or spelling of your name.

To avoid duplicates in the future, use the same form of your name and the same email address when you register for CME courses.

Questions? contact cmetechsupport@jhmi.edu

We would like to share a DVD from our archives. This is a video recording of an interview with the late Dr. Philip Tumulty, renowned clinician and teacher at Johns Hopkins and the founding director of the Division of General Internal Medicine. In the course of the interview, Dr. Tumulty shares his perspectives on his lengthy career at Hopkins School of Medicine and relates his recollections on the early years of Hopkins GIM. The interview was conducted by another departed Hopkins GIM colleague, Dr. Norman Anderson. Dr. Tumulty’s interview is one of a series produced by the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society and were recorded with leaders of American medicine in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tumulty Interview (WMV)
Runtime: 1 hr 3 minutes 29 seconds. This interview was recorded in 1989.

In a recent edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine an article appeared reporting on the results of a survey of physicians and their attitudes regarding funding in CME. We recommend you consider reading this article as it seems to demonstrate that the physician community may not be aware of the firewalls and safeguards in place to prevent bias in certified CME. The accompanying editorial was written by our Associate Dean, Todd Dorman M.D. in conjunction with Ivan Silver MD from the University of Toronto.

PubMed citations:

to the survey results article
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21555662

to the accompanying editorial
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21555663

Later this week Dr. Dorman will be presenting at the PACME meeting in Philadelphia on The new CME paradigm: Not your father’s CME. In addition, in the next edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine Dr. Dorman, in conjunction with Dr. Ivan Silver, will have an editorial on a manuscript to be published in that edition that addresses an important issue within CME.

Dr. Dorman will be speaking at the Pharmaceutical Alliance of CME in May on “The new paradigm for CME” and at the Illinois Chapter of the Alliance of CME in late May on CME as a Value Center.

As mentioned in a previous release, this reaccreditation year we will provide occasional updates as to where we are as an office in the process of reaccreditation.

As a reminder, we are part of the March 2012 cohort and as such, have been preparing required materials for submission to the ACCME.

In February, we uploaded our list of activities to the PARS system to report all activities held or currently scheduled from April, 2008 – March, 2012 – there were 3,625 entries on that list! In March, we received our list from the ACCME of the 15 files chosen for intense review. At this point, we are completing our own intense review of those files to be certain all documentation is in order and files are ready for submission before the July 13 deadline.

We continue to edit our self study that is also due on July 13.

One of the final parts of the review is an interview with ACCME surveyors to review documents submitted and have an opportunity to discuss our program with them. We have requested a face to face interview and are looking forward to that this coming fall.