2011 Annual CACHE Conference

The 2011 CACHE/ACEMC Annual Conference will be held in partnership with the National Continuing Competence Conference (NCCC)
at the Fairmont Banff SpringsHotel, Banff, Alberta, Canada, April 14-15.

Conference theme: Evolving Competence For Health Professions

For almost a decade, the annual meeting of the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education (held in various cities in the US) included a “Canada Day” that was developed by and for Canadian CHE professionals. Canadians appreciated the opportunity to learn and grow from other CHE professionals working in a similar environment. The day became so popular that the regular members of the Canadian contingent began to talk about moving “Canada Day” to Canadian soil. Around the same time that this idea was being born, Canadians became acutely aware of the fact that the presenters at the main ACME sessions were predominantly Canadian.

Develop Your Career With Health Communication

Have you considered a career in medical or health communications? There are several graduate degree programs that may interest you. Here's a description from the Boston University Online Master of Science in Health Communication:

Empowering Health Communicators

Health care is a rapidly growing and ever-evolving field that relies on skilled communications professionals to craft and disseminate messages with clarity and authority on topics that influence public and personal health. From significant contributions in disease prevention, to groundbreaking campaigns in health awareness, and through efforts to improve doctor/ patient relations, Health Communicators are in demand and critical to the facilitation of public awareness and understanding of health care issues. The Boston University Online Master of Science in Health Communication program is designed to shape progressive Health Communicators, equipping them with the tools needed to effectively impact public and personal health literacy.

You can learn more about the BU program here:
http://healthcommunication.bu.edu/

Tufts University also has an MS in Health Communications and you can learn about their program here:
http://www.tufts.edu/med/education/phpd/mshealthcomm/

Emerson College has a Master of Arts (instead of Master of Science) in Health Communications. Learn about their program here:
http://www.emerson.edu/admission/graduate/academics/hc.cfm

Consulting about dietary supplements

Patients seem to always have questions regarding dietary and nutritional supplements. For some reason, this seems to be especially true if you live in an affluent area where people are constantly on the Internet researching different products. They are seeking health information from various sources and they want to learn how they can improve their health and reduce their risk for serious diseases. For instance,  we've recently seen many reports talking about the health benefits of fish oils and omega-3 fatty acids. We've also seen many health-related websites pop up such as http://www.omega3.org and others.

Patients may frequently ask questions about dietary supplements. You may encounter questions like:

• Should I be eating more fish to avoid heart attacks? 
• What if I'm allergic to fish?
  
• Should I take omega-3 fatty acid supplements?
• How much should I take?
• Which type of omega-3 supplement should I buy?
  
• What do you think about websites like http://www.omega3.org?
  

On this topic - let me pause and note that some physicians have set up an online business where they are selling dietary supplements on the Internet. It's very easy to set up a business on the Internet, but I won't comment whether physicians should be selling products directly to their patients because now we're getting into some ethical issues (we're not talking about the Stark Law, but I think you get the idea).

When it comes to fish oil and omega-3, we have fairly robust clinical data regarding the cardiovascular effects of omega-3 fatty acids. We may not know how it impacts inflammatory markers like hs-CRP, but we know how omega-3 impacts triglycerides, HDL-C, and LDL-C. Patients can learn about omega-3 fatty acids by visiting sites like http://www.omega3.org. 

Are you interested in teaching patients about the use of dietary supplements? One way you can do this is to publish some online content that focuses on patient education and consumer health. You can write about the health effects of omega-3 fatty acids on blogs and informative consumer health websites if you have strong writing skills.

Get published online in the New Year

There are many benefits to getting your name published online. It's easy to write your own blog, but will people find your content? Will people recognize your name as someone who is a subject matter expert in a certain field? More and more consumers are looking for health information and you can generate content and get your name published on various types of online articles, blog posts, editorials, etc.

If you'd like to get your name attached to some online articles, allow me to help you by inviting you to submit a short editorial blog post for one of these websites:

• http://www.MedicineandTechnology.com/ 
• http://www.MedicalSmartphones.com/ 
• http://www.MobileHealthComputing.com/ 

These websites are a part of HCPLive, a comprehensive Internet portal for healthcare professionals managed by Intellisphere, LLC.  If your articles get published on these sites, then you can add this as "writing experience" on your resume. I can provide you with more details about that.

Publishing articles on the Internet will:

• Show potential employers your ability to write in an informal, non-academic setting. This is important on a variety of levels, ranging from marketing to consumer health education.
  
• Demonstrate your ability to develop consumer-friendly content. (physicians traditionally are known to struggle with this, because they tend to speak in scientific jargon and they forget to address important health literacy concerns)
  
• Reveal your familiarity (or expertise) in the specific domains, such as health IT, mobile technology, health education, biomedical informatics, Electronic Health Records (EHRs), iPhone, etc.
• Show that you are comfortable with computers and web-based content (physicians are traditionally considered technology-ignorant by many potential employers).
• Improve your presence on the Internet. By publishing articles on the web, these articles will pop up when people search your name on Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo. 
  

Contact me if you'd like to get something published on one of these sites and grow your online presence in the New Year!

Webinar on patient education and adherence

I spent some time in the past working in a health IT consumer health company. We developed computer-based educational modules that were designed to motivate patients to change behavior, improve disease self-management, and learn why they should adhere to therapy. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Well, if you're interested in a career that involves some element of patient education and treatment adherence, then you may wish to participate in an upcoming free webcast/webinar titled, "Views on Patient Adherence." It's sponsored by Catalina Health Resource and the main presenter will be Paul Wilson, Analytics Group, Catalina Health Resource LLC. This is NOT a certified CME/CE activity, but you may still gain some useful insights from it.

Here's a brief description of this webcast:

Ensuring patient adherence to prescribed pharmaceutical therapy can play a significant role in improving the health of both individuals and the general public, and is essential to maintaining pharmaceutical brand market shares. This Webinar, led by Paul Wilson of Catalina Health Resources' analytics group, will present research on some of the demographic and psychological factors that should be taken into account when designing successful patient adherence programs. A case study based on predictive modeling in the hypertension market will demonstrate how to identify low adherence segments for patient education programs. Mr. Wilson will show how these results can be applied to other products and therapeutic areas and make recommendations on the most effective message content for both new and experienced patients.

Key Learning Objectives:
• Identify low adherence segments for patient education programs
• Develop effective messaging for both new and experienced patients

About Catalina Health Resource:

Catalina Health Resource reaches 125 million customers with 1.3 billion highly-relevant messages each year because of our longstanding relationships with the top pharmaceutical, over-the-counter and consumer package goods companies.

As the world's largest personalized health media network, our advanced data management makes it possible to create highly relevant messages based on the most likely needs of a patient. Most often, we deliver these messages via a printed PatientLink® every time a patient fills a prescription in one of the 17,000 pharmacies within our network.

To learn more about this upcoming webinar, visit this link.

Medicare and Care Coordination - a disappointing study in JAMA

There's an interesting article in JAMA this month. It's titled, "Effects of Care Coordination on Hospitalization, Quality of Care, and Health Care Expenditures Among Medicare Beneficiaries"

Here's the bottom line: Care coordination programs don't seem to reduce healthcare costs among Medicare beneficiaries. This is very disappointing since you would hope that patient education would improve clinical outcomes. In this instance, nurses were contacting patients roughly twice each month. Since the patients mainly had heart failure, heart disease, and diabetes, these were patients with significant medical problems.

In my opinion, patient education that only occurs twice per month is not enough. We now have ways to automate and tailor messages. These can be sent via phone, SMS, e-mail, and a variety of other ways. When this study was designed, these resources may not have been refined like they are now. I'm sure a better study could be conducted that utilizes some of these automated technologies. After all, now we have older patients with implanted defibrillators living at home where wireless data is being captured and sent to clinicians in hospitals and offices. These types of systems can all be integrated with a robust care coordination program that can alert patients when they need to make some changes in their lifestyle before they end up being hospitalized.