I loved the interactive case studies (just like I love Medical Meetings' Ethical Hypothetical case studies). My only complaint is that it took such a long time to get through all the introductory stuff that we ran out of time to do even five cases.
The session on excellence in education—I still have whiplash! Dr. James Holly raced through the Southeast Texas Medical Associates model, which I think I'll fall in love with once I have a chance to actually look through all his slides and the Setma.com Web site, where he says they post pretty much everything. Basically, its model of care is all about performance-improvement CME, where they continually measure performance over a set of metrics. He urged other providers to just take those first baby steps toward PI CME, whatever the right toddles might be for your specific organization.
I went to the specialty society community of practice breakout session, and it was interesting to see what their hot topics were: quality (in terms of both value proposition and PI CME); innovations in collaborating with all sorts of other organizations; Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy and CME; and strategic planning/visioning. I promised not to write about the specifics of what we talked about, but it was one of the better sessions of the day, I thought.
Speaking of REMS, I got a little lost during the hot topics session on just that subject later in the afternoon. I don't know if it was due to the post-lunch slump or what, but I'm still not entirely sure I have a good grip on all the issues related to it. I have a feeling REMS will feel a bit nebulous until the FDA publishes its blueprint (or maybe it's just me). Kudos to the panel for agreeing to come back for a half-hour of informal Q&A between the next session and the reception—I wasn't the only one who still had lots of questions when we ran out of time during the session.
Thanks to the AAFP's Mindi McKenna, PhD, MBA, for bringing the discussion back to earth with a great session on the implications of Maintenance of Certification and Maintenance of Licensure for CME collaboration. She also included some audience participation in the form of asking us to respond to questions using an audience response system (did you know that 62 of the 69 licensing jurisdictions require docs to earn CME, or that 15 states currently mandate topic-specific CME? I do now.).
The reception afterward was really nice, too. It seemed to be pretty well-attended, and the crab cakes and conversations both were delicious!
