The Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators (ACRE) is an organization of physicians and colleagues engaged in promoting excellence in medical service, education, and innovation. ACRE members have records of achievement in these endeavors.
Consequently, ACRE recently announced that it will be holding its annual meeting. The meeting will take place on July 22, 2011 at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. For more information about the meeting and registration, click here. ACRE previously held its charter meeting in 2009.
This year’s ACRE meeting will cover a number of areas and topics and will include speakers and representatives from across the health care industry. Topics include:
– Issues in the field of continuing medical education (CME)
– Why Academia/Industry Collaboration is under attack
– Academic Medical Centers; and
– Washington and Innovation
The responsibility of ACRE is to re-establish the partnership of academia, industry, clinicians, and patients in the United States. Among its goals is educating the lay public as well as the medical community about the value to patients of the research and educational collaborations between academia and industry.
Another of ACRE’s main tasks is to set up codes of conduct or guidelines designed to ensure that relationships between academic physicians and industry are ethical and clearly targeted at improving outcomes for our patients. ACRE also represents a voice that is heard and quoted when these industry-academia relationships are attacked, as they have been in the past.
Additionally, ACRE provides education for health care professionals and patient advocates to empower them to fight those policies that undermine productive collaboration.” The organization is also charged with training our current and next generation physicians so they can promote true excellence in medical education and innovation.
It is the responsibility of physicians and organizations like ACRE to argue the value to patients of cooperation between academia and industry in medical education as well as in research.