Call for stricter CME gift rules gets mixed reviews

A proposal to reform continuing medical education funding has some physician educators worried that industry grant money could dry up.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews staff. March 6, 2006.

Some in the CME community are concerned that physicians may end up paying for their continuing medical education courses, or see their CME choices shrink dramatically, if a group of 11 physician and academic leaders persuades academic medical centers to adopt tighter controls on gifts from industry.

This group said the medical profession is still too closely tied to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, and in the Jan. 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, they called for greater reform.

Harry A. Gallis, MD, president of Alliance for CME said some Alliance members were concerned drug companies would respond to these proposals by taking their marketing dollars out of CME and redirecting them into research or advertising.

"CME grant money may dry up if it gets too regulated," Dr. Gallis said.

The working group, sponsored by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, challenged academic medical centers to take the lead in reform efforts by banning faculty from accepting drug company gifts of any size, drug samples, free meals and free travel to meetings.

In addition, the group recommends academic medical centers funnel commercial CME contributions through a single office at each institution, creating a pool of funds where the school, not the individual companies, determines what CME courses are put together.

Academic faculty members also could no longer participate in drug companies' speakers bureaus. They'd see their consulting and research contracts posted on the Internet, and financial support for general research would go to the institution, not to a specific investigator.