According to the AMA MedEd Update, these include:

* The Task Force on Sources of Evidence Pilot Project, which will ask faculty to disclose the source(s) of each of their clinical recommendations so participants can later look up the references for themselves.

* THe Association of American Medical Colleges’ Learning from Teaching Pilot Program, which will document the work that goes into teaching residents and medical students in a clinical setting to help determine how best to award AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ to physician faculty members who do this sort of teaching.

* The third, proposed by The Mayo Clinic, will look at if, when, and how AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ should be awarded for physicians who create new clinical guidelines or adapt existing guidelnes.

I’d say it means we need to stay the course we’ve been on since the Act was first passed: Get informed about the Sunshine Act provisions and how they could affect your business. For CME providers, this article can help. For pharma folks, here’s something to get you started. Of course, everything could shift again after November, but for now, it looks like we need to keep on moving forward as if all the act’s provisions will be put into play on schedule.

Thanks in advance for your help!

So imagine how excited I was when I saw that the CME Congress, the “Olympics of CME” that is held just once every four years in Toronto, was planning to shake things up a little. I’d like to applaud the CME Congress organizers at the Society for Academic CME, the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions, the Association for Hospital Medical Educators, the Canadian Association of Continuing Health Education, and host University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, Office of Continuing Medical Education and Professional Development (co-chaired by SACME President Gabrielle Kane and University of Toronto’s Ivan SIlver, MD) for doing something we all talk about a lot, but seldom put into practice at our own meetings: Really designing the meeting to maximize learning.

But first, let me get my geek on and say how glad I was to see the Congress offering a vibrant social media presence. There was a dedicated member of the University of Toronto CEPD monitoring the event Twitter hashtag, and quite of few of the participants were tweeting our aha! moments and key takeaways throughout the event. We also were welcomed to participate on the organization’s Facebook page, and there was a mobile site set up for the Congress—not to mention free Wi-Fi throughout the meeting space! Not that a lot of people took advantage of it, but for those of us who like that sort of thing, it felt good to be in the center of things instead of on the fringe.

But what I really loved was the conference organizers’ willingness to shake things up. While the congress was organized around five main themes—medical simulation, safety and quality improvement, assessment of clinicians, optimizing learning, and interprofessional continuing education—they came at these themes in a number of different, sometimes even playful ways. The plenaries offered both main speakers and “discussants” who would take what the speaker had to say to new levels and/or discuss the practical implications of the topic. The concurrent sessions offered a mix of 60- to 80-minute sessions that were either intensive workshops led by one team of faculty, or best practices/research sessions consisting of a mix of 12-minute presentations on related topics.

Then there was the plenary on engaging learners that entailed a “play within a play,” where two people role-played the realities of how pedagogy, politics, and practicality—the plenary’s topic—played out in real life. Well, maybe not quite like real life, since it entailed conference co-chair Ivan Silver, MD, MEd, sprinting down the aisle in his “IdeaMan” superhero costume. Then there was a “Survivor”-style facilitated poster session. Grouped to represent either Canada or the U.S., each presenter had just three minutes and three slides to make his or her case. The audience voted for the top three, who then went into a challenge round to deem the ultimate poster survivor winner. I opted to go to the Innovations Booth during that timeframe, which was fantastic. In just four 15-minute sets, I learned about four innovations that could help save time, streamline CME operations, and improve learning. Finally, there were the Fringe sessions, which gave us a glimpse into new and different approaches to CME, from game-based learning to using dramatic presentations to inform and educate.

I don’t think I even once heard a presenter say, “Do as I’m saying, not as I’m doing,” though I do have to admit we still are in need of remedial work when it comes to unreadable PowerPoint slides. Kudos to the CME Congress organizers for a job extraordinarily well done. I can’t wait for 2016!

I don’t know why, but somehow over the past few days at the CME Congress I have found myself several times saying things along the lines of, but there’s still a need to pass along knowledge, even if it doesn’t result in behavior change. And I do believe there is, because that’s where behavior change starts—you can’t do better if you don’t know better. But, of course, just because you know better doesn’t mean you will do better. There are further steps you usually have to take, and all kinds of reasons (both within and without your control) that can prevent you from making that change.

Behavior change usually is a multi-step process, but you do have to start somewhere, and often that somewhere is learning, even if it doesn’t immediately lead to anything else. I don’t think anyone struggles with that. It’s keeping the process moving so learning does eventually become action that can be difficult, right?

First up was Dr. Charles Boelen, former coordinator of the World Health Organization’s program of human resources for health and current health systems consultant. He talked about the changing world today’s healthcare professional works in, from demographic changes and environmental shifts to the economic whirlwind we’ve been adapting to lately, the growth of globalization, and need for more transparency.

It was interesting that he called a systems approach that shows a progression from medical education to improved practice to an improved healthcare system that will in turn benefit society as a whole “a bit naive.” But he’s right, it’s not that linear a process. And it is backward to start from education and move up, rather than start with the societal needs and move backward to figuring out how to design education that will help address those needs.

Key quote: “We’ve been educating for decades, and only now are asking what for.”

And the biggest of those societal needs that make up the “what for,” he said, were relevance, equity so all can benefit (he pointed to a 20-year difference in life expectancy between people who live in different parts of London as an example of current inequity), quality, and cost-effectiveness.

And there are lots of strategic opportunities for CPD, he said, including:

* Improve the performance of academic institutions.

* Participate in designing and testing new strategies

* Create new synergies with key stakeholders

One interesting point he made is that we tend to confuse medicine with health: Medicine only addresses about 10 percent of our health issues; the other 90 percent is due to things including social and environmental factors. “We have to work on preventing illness,” he said, not just curing disease.

It was a good overview, and a good way to kick off the meeting, I thought.

On the don’t side is Stephen Lewis, MA, CCMEP, president of Global Education Group and a regular Medical Meetings columnist. Here’s a video he posted to his company’s video blog that outlines why he thinks we need to be careful not to fall too in love with the shiny new social media toys. (Watch for his column in the June issue for more.)

On the more pro-social-media-in-CME side we have Derek Warnick, who posted a response video outlining why he feels there is a valid role for social media in CME.

I’d guess it’s no secret that I lean more toward Derek’s line of thought than Stephen’s, especially in that I don’t think anyone is really saying that social media will replace other formats for CME, especially not face-to-face education, and that there are a lot of ways we can and likely should be taking advantage of the technology.

But, while I haven’t seen it happen in the CME arena, I have seen other types of educational activities make the mistake of using social media just because they can, not because it provides another way to help their learners learn.

As with anything else, social media is only useful to the extent that it can be be used to meet the goals and objectives of the activity and achieve the outcomes you set out to achieve. As Stephen points out, it is just the medium, a tool, not the message.

So, what do you think? Leave a comment or drop me a line.

P.S. I’ll be attending the Global Alliance for Medical Education annual conference and the CME Congress 2012, both in Toronto, later this month. I hope to see you there!