ACP Highlights

ACP Journal Club Plus

College members can sign up for ACP Journal Club Plus, the College's new electronic updating service, starting May 20. A supplement to the popular ACP Journal Club, the service provides customized e-mail alerts of new research and a fully searchable online database.

ACP Journal Club Plus was created to help busy physicians stay abreast of the rapidly growing medical literature relevant to the practice of internal medicine. Members can choose the type of information they receive according to their own clinical interests (including general internal medicine, hospital medicine, and over 20 subspecialties) and the frequency of their alerts. All research selected for inclusion is subject to ACP Journal Club's rigorous quality standards and is rated by at least three practicing physicians in each relevant specialty.

“You can read the 130 premier clinical journals that go into ACP Journal Club Plus or you can have the ACP Journal Club Plus research staff and 5,000 clinical raters do the heavy lifting for you,” said Brian Haynes, MACP, editor of ACP Journal Club Plus. “That way you can concentrate precious reading time on the 25 or so articles each year that are most important to your clinical practice. It's your choice.”

Every article included in the alerts is rated on a seven-point scale for newsworthiness and relevance to specific specialties. Users can set threshold scores for newsworthiness or relevance and can further filter their alerts by patient population, discipline and frequency.

Simply clicking on an article's title takes the user to a link to the article's abstract, ratings for other specialties, comments from other readers, and any available free full-text link.

A fully searchable database makes it easy to find specific citations, with results ordered according to most recent or best match, or limited to the user's identified areas of interest. The search page also includes links to relevant content in other areas of the College, such as Annals of Internal Medicine and ACP Journal Club abstracts and commentaries.

You can sign up for the e-mail alerts online.

ACP Hospitalist

April's cover story: A growing number of hospitals are incorporating complementary and alternative medicine into their treatment through the use of so-called integrative medicine, which blends conventional and nonconventional tactics rather than using one or the other exclusively.

May's cover story: Conflicts of interest. Hospitals are building barriers to conflicts of interest through policies that affect everything from pharmaceutical samples, free food and trinkets to funding for continuing medical education.

PIER

Quality Measures

The updated PIER Quality Measures Tool comprises all 119 measures included in the 2008 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative from CMS. Included are the criteria for applying the quality measures and links to supporting recommendations and evidence in PIER. There are also links from appropriate modules to the Quality Measures Tool.

New PIER Point-of-Care CME Program

ACP Members can now earn 10 free AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ by using the new PIER Point-of-Care CME tool. You can access this tool by clicking on the “CME Diary” link in the upper right corner of any PIER module page.

This CME program enables you to record your clinical questions in a “diary” and document the location of the answers to these questions in PIER. Each question is worth 0.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™.