Providers should always take the position that the ACCME’s Criteria shouldn’t limit them in what they’re doing, but should offer them the opportunity to do what makes sense and what’s fair and what’s reasonable and what’s of value. And there’s a population of people who believe that continuing medical education is about technical issues, about changing practice, and if it doesn’t have an impact on what the doc does tomorrow, it’s not really relevant; people who talk about a literature that says traditional continuing medical education doesn’t change practice.
There’s another group of people who believe that continuing medical education is a scholarly pursuit. It’s part of reflection in practice, it’s part of where people think about what it is that they should do. They take problems from the bedside and they take it to continuing medical education and they find solutions in
When people are offered educational activities like genomics, that might be part of future practice, this is the opportunity for discussions and thought about how you can look at the information that you now have and as you sit and listen to information develop, and you get new information from the literature, from the lay press, from that which is developed over the next few years, you can incorporate the new information into your practice and see how it is going to have impact.
Another important thing is that your patients are going to come to the physicians with what they’re reading on the Web and what they know about genomics how it could be effective now for them, for their cancer care or for their aplastic anemia. Or it could be: How is this going to impact us in the future? And the physician can have a reasonable, knowledgeable discussion with the patients about this element that’s not part of today’s scope of practice but perhaps part of future scope of practice.
