Here are a few of the stories and blog posts related to continuing medical education that caught our attention in the past week.
• Slicing the Pharma Spending Pie
Check out the latest from @pharmaguy, who writes the Pharma Marketing Blog. In his post, Promotional Spending in 2013 of the Top 20 Big Pharma Spenders, he includes a pie chart based on the result of the Cegedim Strategic Data Audit of the top 20 U.S. pharmaceutical companies’ promotional spending last year. Professional detailing still tops the chart at 68 percent of the total spend, followed by direct-to-consumer promotions at 21 percent, and professional meetings at 9 percent. Want to see a sign of the changing times? Journal ads came in at just about zero.
• CME on Eating Well
Continuing medical education company Rockpointe’s president, Tom Sullivan, had a busy week on the Policy and Medicine blog. A recent post outlines some of the bills that have been introduced around the country that affect CME. Among them is the Education and Training for Health Act of 2014 (HR 4378), which would require docs employed by the federal government to take six hours of CME on nutrition to help prevent nutrition-related diseases including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes through lifestyle changes. He says, “Medical education is an important step towards that goal.”
• No Point in Tracking Payments to APRNs?
Also from the Policy and Medicine blog: A post about Connecticut’s new law that will require pharmaceutical companies to add advanced practice registered nurses to the ranks of those for whom they must track spending. He concludes, “Because APRNs make up less than 1 percent of the total payments to healthcare providers in neighboring Massachusetts and there are only 3,424 APRNs in Connecticut—about half as many as in Massachusetts—the collection expenses and potential fines are significantly larger than the potential payments themselves.”
• Manufacturers Really Want to Help People
But is all this regulation really necessary? @TheCMEGuy shares what he learned at the recent ACEhp Industry Summit:
I went to this week’s ACEhp Industry Summit meeting and heard people employed by pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers talk passionately about improving the quality of healthcare in America. There was no talk about products or logos or marketing. There was talk about quality improvement, quality measures, and utilizing the continuing education of healthcare providers to improve the unacceptably low percentage of citizens receiving standard levels of care in this country.
See more at A Quick Hit from #2014AIS: Learning from Those Who Care.
