In ACCME's testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Aging on July 29 of this year, Dr. Murray Kopelow, the chief executive of ACCME, defended the integrity of the embattled organization in part by pointing out that they have beefed up their enforcement of anti-commercial bias policies.He said that he has begun to give extra "scrutiny" to organizations that "receive a large amount of commercial support," and said that 10% of all ACCME providers are now on probation. But how well does ACCME actually regulate the bad apples of CME--generally speaking, those for profit MECCs who are completely dependent on commercial support for their very existence and who consistently bend the Standards of Commercial Support in order to maintain the flow of money?
In a fascinating post by Bernard Carroll on Health Care Renewal, we get a close-up view of ACCME's new commitment to enforcement, which while showing some signs of life is severely lacking in bite.
Dr. Carroll had filed a formal complaint on December 23, 2008 about a web-based round-table discussion of the use of antipsychotics in depression, which was chaired by Charles Nemeroff (the disgraced psychiatrist who resigned under pressure as chair of psychiatry at Emory after the New York Times reported that he lied to the University about payments from GlaxoSmithKline, promising officials that he would limit his earnings to the required $10,000/year from promotional talks, then going on to earn $170,000 that year alone.)
Nemeroff's program was produced by CME Outfitters and was funded by Astra Zeneca, maker of Seroquel, an antipsychotic which was recently approved for add-on treatment of depression. After its investigation, according to Dr. Carroll, the ACCME determined that the program did, indeed, violate its standards. In particular, the course was commercially biased in favor of the sponsor's treatment because it downplayed negative side effects of Seroquel while giving short shrift to alternative, safer depression treatments.
So far, so good. The monitoring system appears to be working. Or is it?
Dr. Carroll asks a series of questions that will prod ACCME to think about the logical next step.
--If this accredited CME program was corrupted by commercial bias, shouldn't the ACCME force CME Outfitters to contact all the physicians who participated in the course in order to explain to them that they were given biased medical information?
--Shouldn't the CME credit obtained through this program be revoked?
--Shouldn't CME Outfitters be required to ascertain whether patients were harmed as a result of their biased education (for example, how many patients were put on Seroquel for depression and later developed obesity, diabetes, or heart disease as a result?).
--Will ACCME publically list its sanctions against CME Outfitters and other MECCs who have aired commercially biased CME? Or are we going to have to depend on the occasional blogger to reveal these egregious cases?
These are all crucial questions, and Dr. Carroll is awaiting a reply. Aren't we all?
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