Following up on his testimony before the Senate Committee on Aging last July, Health and Human Services Inspector General Lewis Morris and colleague Julie Taitsman renewed their call for severing all ties between industry and continuing medical education. In an article in the current New England Journal of Medicine (subscription required), they also outlined an industry pooling arrangement as a halfway agenda for limiting industry influence over CME.

A "pooled-funding mechanism, using safeguards to ensure that CME programas serve an educational need and that industry donors cannot influence CME content, offers a promising compromise solution that may allow the medical profession to enjoy subsidized CME," Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the OIG, and Julie K. Taitsman wrote.

They prefer eliminating CME entirely, but that would require "physicians to pay for their own continuing education." Pricetag for that would only be $1,500 per doctor, they estimate.

How likely is the pooling arrangement to catch on? Not very, judging by the evidence offered in their article. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has announced plans to set up a pool to collect industry contributions for CME activities in their field. But "to date several device companies have declined the request by the academy to fund the CME grant organization."

The government lawyers called some CME activities a "cleverly disguised" kickback scheme, such as those where industry funders directed CME providers to pay high honoraria to big prescribers who taught the activities.