Anne Taylor-Vaisey sent me a link this morning to an interesting article in American Medical News, Iowa Practice Draws Notice for its 'No-Gift' Policy. Interesting how the idea is spreading--or at least, how I'm hearing more about it than I used to.
More to the point for CME providers, though, is this article, which also was the subject of a session (I had to miss this one, unfortunately) at the recent Alliance for CME conference. Here's a snippet:
- The trend of linking continuing medical education to performance improvement is gaining momentum. The American Academy of Family Physicians has launched a new online program called Measuring, Evaluating and Translating Research Into Care that's geared to help physicians improve patient care and meet maintenance-of-certification requirements...Developed by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the METRIC program consists of a series of quality improvement modules, focusing primarily on single disease conditions. The first two are being released in 2005.
Good for AAFP for its work in getting this ball rolling on shifting CME from seats in seats to demonstrable learning, improved behavior, and hopefully better patient care. However physicians may feel about maintenance of certification including lifelong learning, self-assessment, self-directed learning, and the need to document improvements in practice it is becoming a reality for many board-certified specialties. And you can expect to see more specialty societies jumping on the MOC train in the near future. With 21 of the 24 boards in the American Board of Medical Specialties already adopting the MOC process, and many hospitals and insurance companies requiring board certification for employment, maintenance of certification will be nothing less than a job requirement, if not now, soon.
