CME Spotlight: Performance improvement and collaboration
pharmafile | July 15, 2010 | Feature | Medical Communications | CME, CME Spotlight, Eugene Pozniak
In the 1990s we were informed by TV commercials with slick voice-overs and a backdrop of huge traffic jams, that the internet would make travel congestion a thing of the past, that we would be working from home, saving our employers unnecessary office overheads and keeping pollution to a minimum – 1990s-speak for “doing our bit for the environment”. IBM products and services were going to be our stepping stones to this remote-working nirvana and relegate rush-hour traffic to be a relic of some bygone era.
With each seemingly sensible prediction, global disease outbreaks like SARS, Icelandic volcanic ash or terrorist attacks, we still primarily work in offices and still have a penchant for flying to meetings. Even in our new broadband age, reporting of meetings, other than the largest of medical society meetings, does not replace attendance, however many Tweets and blogs are posted. Last month it was not a difficult decision for me to make to attend the annual meeting of the Global Alliance for Medical Education (GAME www.game-cme.org) in Montreal.
As in previous years, it was a worthwhile event to attend. The meeting started with an opening keynote address made by Thomas Stossel, a practising oncologist and American Cancer Society Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Stossel is against the demonisation of the pharmaceutical industry and presented the room with slide after slide of persuasive data showing the positives that the pharmaceutical industry brings to society and in the treatment and elimination of disease.
He is an active spokesperson for promoting what he sees as balanced policies at academic institutes, within government and supports the promotion of valuable collaborations between industry and their research and academic counterparts rather than being hindered by the escalation of the current anti-business and anti-pharma witch-hunt.
It was interesting to note that we do not have a ‘European Dr Stossel’, but rather than taking his presentation as a cautionary tale, it serves as a reminder of the importance of the work that EFPIA, and the national regulatory bodies do in promoting the positive work that industry carries out.
There were two key themes that prevailed throughout the main meeting. Firstly the concept of Performance Improvement CME (PI-CME). US CME is a very mature system and PI-CME is now even becoming somewhat of a shorthand for the ‘new CME’ that is being practised in the US. PI-CME encompasses a structured, longer-term process where doctors assess their own clinical practice, identify ‘performance measures’ to be put into place over a period of time (whether as a series of accredited educational activities, or other targeted change activity), then assess the impact this has had on their clinical practice.
On balance it is something that we see evidence of across Europe; the Royal Colleges expect this kind of approach to all the educational activities the UK doctors count towards their CPD, and the European Accreditation Council for CME (EACCME) incorporates these factors into their accreditation requirements. At the moment we lack a vocabulary of widely accepted terminology to act as a clear explanation of CME as the Americans have developed, which would help to clarify the benefits of CME to a broader group of people in Europe.
The other theme that ran through the GAME meeting was the importance of ‘collaboration’. It wasn’t that many years ago where collaborating with one’s ‘competitors’ was unthinkable. IBM was talking about traffic jams because they had a suite of products to sell and they were the market leader, hence the benefit of a generic campaign to promote home or remote working. But it is difficult to work in isolation in the CME sphere, to make a good CME programme involves creating partnerships and high levels of co-operation. The interactive session at the meeting highlighted this importance as we suddenly found ourselves getting to know our delegate neighbours and identifying for ourselves routes for collaboration by examining where we could each compliment the other working on potential synergies in order to develop more relevant and higher quality CME programmes.
Collaborations get you out of a jam
I have mentioned the activities of the Good CME Practice group in previous articles, where over a dozen ‘competing’ education providers have come together to work on defining common standards when developing CME programmes; I have also described how CME accreditation bodies are working towards converging standards in how they review and accredit CME programmes. A similar move is now happening within the pharmaceutical industry. Individuals with a responsibility for, or an interest in, CME are getting together to discuss how pharma-supported CME can develop in territories outside the US. These discussions are helping to identify common themes and objectives where people can also exchange experiences and expectations. It is interesting to hear the voices from a variety of companies share common opinions, aspirations and challenges. It is an important time for pharma companies to assess how they are to interact with this important channel, that is held to such high scrutiny in the US, in the rapidly developing environment in Europe, and how they are going to structure and support this function internally.
Collaboration is a theme that runs through many things today, even in the 15 or so years since IBM first talked about traffic jams they now embrace them and even look forward to gridlock. Instead of predicting their disappearance, they are now looking at how to predict when and where they will occur, up to an hour in advance, through predictive modelling technology. By matching their software and computational skills and collaborating with mobile phone companies and GPS partners they can map how traffic density changes, and be able to predict when it will come to a standstill. This same technology can also be used to map how different patients respond to HIV and cancer drugs to give swift responses to the suitability of what can be at times experimental therapies.
It is interesting to see how much further collaboration can get us.
Eugene Pozniak is Managing Director of Siyemi Learning and Programme Director of European CME Forum. Email: epozniak@siyemi.org. Information about the Good CME Practice Group can be found at www.gCMEp.eu.
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