In pushing to include a government-run health insurance plan in the healthcare bill, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is taking a calculated gamble that the 60 members of his caucus could support the plan if it included a way for states to opt out. Reid met with President Obama at the White House Thursday to inform him of his inclination to add the public option to the bill, but did not specifically ask the president to endorse that approach, a Democratic aide said.
Enrollment in both new and existing U.S. medical schools continues to expand to meet the nation's need for more doctors, according to data released by the Association of American Medical Colleges. First-year enrollment in the nation's medical schools rose this year by 2% over 2008 to nearly 18,400 students.
Although the CME standards the ACCME put in place in 2006 (facilities have until 2012 to fully comply) aren’t asking CME providers to track exactly what physicians learn, they require CME to be:
Focused on practice-based learning
Derived from the physicians’ professional practice gaps
Designed to change physician strategies, performance, or patient outcomes
Evaluated for its effectiveness in changing strategies, performance, or patient outcomes
"CME is becoming more aligned with performance improvement. Basically, what the ACCME is saying is that CME doesn’t make sense unless it addresses a bona fide need and leads to some real change," says Charles Huntington, PA, MPH, associate dean of continuing and community education at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington.
Although meeting these requirements sounds daunting, small changes can make a big difference. For example, the University of Connecticut School of Medicine is pushing its various departments to revise their educational interventions to solicit audience participation. "Although there may be a component that is didactic, they really need to allow time for audience discussion," says Huntington.
One department is doing a particularly good job of engaging participants, he says. Each CME topic is covered during the course of two or three sessions, and at the end of the first session, the presenters ask the audience members what they want to learn more about. Presenters then use this information to develop the next two sessions.
The university is also focusing on CME that engages physicians in performance improvement projects within their areas of practice. Practitioners who engage in this type of CME must define an area they want to improve, measure their current performance, plan and implement a process change, and measure the effectiveness of the change.
"This is a real culture change. We are asking our providers to think about CME in a very different way," Huntington says.
This article was adapted from one that originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Doctor’s Office, a HealthLeaders Media publication.
Lawmakers agreed to block a permanent repeal of Medicare's payment formula for doctors. Although sympathetic to fixing the root problem, they concluded that the legislation's $247 billion 10-year price tag was too steep in an era of record deficits. Lawmakers routinely override the formula that sets Medicare payments to doctors, a move to prevent physicians from turning away Medicare patients because they are paid too little for the visits. While the vast majority in Congress agree that the formula is a failed model, producing the enormous sum needed to eliminate it has proven impossible, reports the Washington Post.
A new poll indicates that physicians in Massachusetts overwhelmingly support the state's 2006 healthcare overhaul, which is considered a national model. Doctors supported the law by a 5-to-1 margin, and three-quarters of the 2,135 physicians surveyed said they wanted the law to continue. But nearly half said there should be changes, most notably to ensure more comprehensive coverage for their patients and to control costs.
The University of Connecticut is looking for a collaborative solution to resolve the long-running problem of its cash-strapped health center in Farmington. The new strategy marks a change from 2007 when UConn broke off talks with area hospitals in a go-it-alone strategy and then tried unsuccessfully to get the legislature to approve the new hospital plan. In a high-level meeting this week, the top leaders of UConn, Hartford Hospital, and St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center met to discuss the matter. The meeting included a review of a detailed, 26-page outline of St. Francis' vision for the future of John Dempsey Hospital and the UConn Health Center.