Vital Signs

ASM Issues Legislative Priorities for New Congress

The Alliance of Specialty Medicine (ASM), a coalition of 14 national medical specialty societies representing more than 220,000 physicians, has wasted no time in setting its priorities before President Bush and the new Congress, including:

• Enacting reforms that will reduce frivolous lawsuits and stabilize professional liability insurance costs.
• Reviewing and revising the formula that determines a physician's annual Medicare adjustment for treating Medicare beneficiaries.
• Enacting and implementing important patient safety legislation that protects the confidentiality of doctors and patients in reporting medical outcomes.

ACCME Clarifies Standards on Conflict of Interest

A continuing medical education (CME) provider is hired by a drug company to run an event where a doctor (hired by the same drug company) presents a CME seminar or authors a CME paper. Is that allowed?

These and other CME-related questions are addressed in The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education's (ACCME) new standards regarding conflicts of interest from commercial support. These standards will be effective for new CME activities after May 2005 and for all CME activities by November 2006.

As a follow-up to the release of these standards, the ACCME is offering supplemental resources in the form of additional questions and answers available in .pdf format on the group's Web site at accme.org. The Q&A download is available under Additional Questions and Answers Regarding the Updated Standards for Commercial Support.

"Tune In" to Help Detect Counterfeit Drugs

The Food and Drug Administration announced that electronic "tags" are now being affixed to the packaging of some drugs to aid in tracking the medications as they move through the supply chain. The hope is that radio frequency identification technology will help in detecting counterfeit drugs as the products travel from the manufacturer to intermediary distributors and then on to pharmacies.

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