Planners who run
continuing medical education programs are under the gun, trying to
cope with new policy mandates from the Accreditation Council for
Continuing Medical Education as well as grappling with new
requirements for organizations seeking accreditation from the
Chicago-based council.
On Aug. 24, ACCME released policy
updates that redefined the council’s Standards for Commercial
Support, which govern the financial relationships between companies
that produce or sell health-care products or services and
organizations that produce CME programs.
The new policies, to go into effect
over the next three months, are designed to clarify existing
policies and further safeguard the educational content of CME
programs from the influence of drug and other health-care
companies.
According to Dr. Murray Kopelow, chief
executive of ACCME, these mandates are not a direct response to the
rebuke ACCME received in April from the U.S. Senate Committee on
Finance, which said health-care companies still had too many
opportunities to affect programs under current ACCME rules. Kopelow
said he believes the new policies “will have significant positive
impact on the credibility of the system, benefiting all our
providers and the system as a whole.”
The impact of the updates still is
being calculated. What’s more certain is that stringent new
guidelines for accreditation by ACCME will have a major influence
on CME providers.
Wanda Johnson, CMP, senior director of
meetings and education for Chevy Chase, Md.-based The Endocrine
Society, who in August gave a presentation on the subject at ASAE
& The Center for Association Leadership’s annual meeting in
Chicago, said the changes represented “a revolution, not an
evolution,” of ACCME requirements.
The new guidelines likely will require
CME providers to craft new mission statements; to measure and
document virtually every aspect of their program development; to
define “gaps” in physicians’ knowledge; and then, for some CME
programs, to verify how doctors’ behavior changes as a result of
the education.
Additionally, beginning next fall,
organizations seeking the highest levels of accreditation will have
to demonstrate that they constantly are evaluating and improving
their programs.