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.

To further strengthen his point, he exhorted the audience to “be meeting managers, not meeting planners. Be in on strategy, not just execution.” In short, he said, you need to put yourself in a position to get the proverbial seat at the table. And you can if you understand the value you bring to that table, including:

* You are the compliance gate-keepers. Whatever the company’s policies, you are the ones to ensure they are carried out.

* You own and can leverage the relationships on which this business still runs.

* You can help the company deliver the most benefit at the least cost, while still ensuring that the meeting’s, and the company’s goals, are met.

Shawn Seipler showed us a short video and explained how he and Paul Till decided in 2009 to form a 501(c)(3) organization to collect and recycle soap and shampoo products discarded by the hospitality industry, and distribute them to those who, because they don’t have access to the products necessary for good hygiene, now die from poor-hygiene-related illnesses around the world daily.

How many times have I looked at that barely used soap bar and thought about what a waste it was to have it just thrown out, but it never occurred to me to take it to the next level, as Shawn and his partner did. It was just astonishing to see how much good they could do out of what didn’t look like a slick operation: Just boxes of used soaps, some machines to disinfect and melt the soap and reshape it into new bars, and a group of volunteers eager to scrape the outer layer of yuck off the soap so it could begin the process, and assemble bags of donated hygiene-related products for distribution to shelters. (I’ll post some pics when I get them downloaded from my camera. It’s really pretty amazing.)

The whole thing was fascinating, and, as my first real CSR (corporate social responsibility) event, I could see how we started to build some relationships with each other as we scraped and bagged. I got a little too into it and had to finish filling up our last box of packaged bags, so I missed the final total of what we had accomplished, but I did get a hug from the staff person I had been working beside as I dashed after the group to get on the bus, which felt better to me than having hard numbers to talk about.

P.S. We also had the chance to do a quick site of the Gaylord Palms, which in addition to all the glorious meeting space it already had has recently opened a very cool sports bar that can be bought out for events, and an soon-to-open water park that looks like every kid’s wildest dream.

P.P.S. Many, many thanks to our hosts at Hyatt for the lovely food, music, and company last night. It was the perfect way to end an all-around great pre-con day.

They’re going to talk about the basic items you need to include; how to estimate variances based on the type of program; what you need to do to ensure your budget aligns with corporate, state, and federal regulations, as well as industry guidances; tips and techniques for ensuring you get the most value for your meeting spend; and how to avoid common budget pitfalls.

I hope you can make it (register/more info here)! If you’re busy at 1 ET tomorrow, you can always sign up to watch it on demand later; it should be posted within a couple of days.

The other, titled Transparent or Translucent?, gave me a different way to look at the whole concept of transparency. Increased transparency has been a big push in CME: Sometimes it’s a good thing—like the ACCME’s attempts to make its processes and procedures clearer—and sometimes what sounds like a good thing can have some unintended bad consequences (witness the new proposed rule in the Sunshine Act that could cause a real nightmare in reporting requirements for CME providers). Does being able to see clear through something, such as financial relationships between healthcare providers and pharma, really engender trust? Given what happened with ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs series, I tend to doubt it. Not sure what translucence would look like in this case, but it’s an interesting concept to ponder, isn’t it?

If you aren’t already familiar with the issues involved in this aspect of the proposed Sunshine Act, I would urge you do get up to speed (resources: here and here). And do it today, because the deadline to respond to the HHS is tomorrow, February 17. This could really affect your business, so please check into it and let HHS know what you think. (Submit comments here.)

Update: I forgot to mention that the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions also has weighed in on this issue (download a PDF of its response here). Not surprisingly, the Alliance has many of the same objections to this proposal as the CME Coalition. To quote from the Alliance letter to CMS:

“These potential consequences include: (1) reluctance on the part of physicians to serve as faculty or even to participate in industry-supported CME because the reporting requirements could result in the incorrect perception that these individuals are receiving some direct benefit from industry support; (2) burdensome reporting requirements for CME providers who already operate with limited resources and tight margins and would be required to determine the value of benefits that accrue to covered recipients attending CME programs; and (3) a reluctance on the part of commercial supporters to fund CME activities due to the difficulty in calculating, tracking and reporting the indirect benefit of their support on faculty and participants.”

One thing that seemed to be of huge concern was the idea that exhibitors were going to start asking them to provide physician attendees’ National Provider Identification numbers. Since this is public information, I’m having a hard time understanding why that is the meeting planner’s problem—why can’t the exhibitors just look them up? If someone can explain why this is potentially a big issue for exhibitors, please let me know. I tried to find out from a few folks after the session ended, but everyone was in a rush to leave so I didn’t really get much other than if an exhibitor demands it, it’s their problem. Which I get, but I don’t get why exhibitors would demand this from them. Light-shedding on this would be welcome!

Other big issues were the costs of complying with government regulations and Accreditation Council for CME rules, pressures to find new sources of revenue, building traffic to the exhibition floor, international initiatives (including visa-related challenges), CME credit interchange with other countries, and all the various codes and rules and regulations they are supposed to follow nowadays.

One participant was particularly concerned about the Council of Medical Specialty Societies’ newish ethical code that is designed to limit drug and device company influence over patient care. While similar in many ways to the ACCME’s Standards for Commercial Support, it also prohibits society presidents, CEOs, and editors-in-chief of society journals from having direct financial relationships with relevant for-profit companies in the healthcare sector. One participant said her organization actually had to ask one of its journal editors to resign after her society agreed to abide by the CMSS code.

Sponsorships and exhibit dollars on the decline had most of the crowd at least someone frazzled. As one person said, “With the PhRMA Code, they don’t want to sponsor anything anymore.” Several said their organizations were going the same route as PCMA, offering year-round sponsorships that extend far beyond the meeting rather than providing one-offs on tote bags and banners. (Note: This article offers some good tips on how to get more sponsorship dollars. And here’s another one.) One thing sponsors particularly seem to like, said some participants, is being able to meet with board members and other influential people in the industry at board and other high-level meetings. Some said they give preferential treatment on the show floor to exhibitors that are also in more extensive sponsorship relationships, others said they kept it completely separate.

From what people were saying, I’m not sure they’d buy into this snip of research finding that physicians aren’t eschewing the trade show floor now that the tchotches are out due to PhRMA Code restrictions. It sounds like, for medical meetings as for other types of association conferences, it’s becoming more and more of a push to get people on the show floor and interacting with exhibitors. While product theaters can help, they don’t appear to be a major solution to the exhibition drain problem. As one person said, “The surveys say they value exhibitions, but they don’t go. We give them food, product theaters, we’re even putting the reception on the show floor. Nothing seems to help.”

One said she was going to take the “continue the conversation” idea from PCMA, where a follow-on informal session is held after a keynote so those who want to can dive deeper into the material, only hold it on the show floor. Which is fine, as long as it isn’t for credit, warned another person. Another pointed to a different angle on the problem: Maybe it’s the booths that aren’t so attractive. So that organization offers a consultant who can evaluate exhibitor booths and suggest ways to improve them.

Some said they had added a virtual trade show component as a complement to repurposing educational content from the conference for online distribution, but it didn’t appear that the value was all that high (one said that only 42 percent of virtual attendees visited the virtual exhibit, which I thought actually sounded pretty good. Another said it was more like 25 percent for his group). Streaming the educational session, with or without CME credit attached, live and archived, seemed to be pretty popular among attendees of most of the planners who said they had done it. However, interest dropped off a cliff when members were asked if they would pay for it, one person said (shocking, I know!). Another said she had a good response to charging one fee to get access to all the content, and an additional fee on top of it if they wanted to get CME credit for it.

They didn’t talk a lot about CME educational grants, but one person did point out that, now that pharma budgets for CME grants are shrinking, their ad budgets actually are growing. Accordingly, medical organizations are beginning to put more of their focus on attracting those ad dollars to support the overhead for their meetings.

There was more—a lot more—but I’ll leave this one with two of the wildest promotional ploys I’ve heard of:

One was a company that brought colored chalk and proceeded to draw its logo on the sidewalk in front of the medical conference’s headquarters hotel. Another person told of a company that put its logo on the mainsail of a big sailboat and had it sail up and down the harbor in view of the meeting (I’m not sure if this was in San Diego, but I could see it happening there.)

Note: This is cross-posted at the face2face blog.

This quote at the end of the article is really interesting, I thought: [Stephen Smith, chief strategist, MDLinx] called the perceptions of lesser quality an unintended consequence of the increase in regulation on pharmaceutical companies’ communications and their resulting pull-out from CME. “We’ve squeezed everything toward mediocrity to prevent abuses.”