With more and more states adopting medical marijuana programs, Dr. Bryan Doner saw a knowledge gap developing between the scientific community, health care providers and medical patients.
As both a physician and an investor, Doner realized that many medical professionals lacked significant education about the effects and uses of medical cannabis. With the goal of disseminating cannabis research, Doner started Compassionate Certification Centers in Pennsylvania.
“People didn’t really know that much at all about (existing research), even though there is science out there to be learned,” he says. “So, we took the ball and started running with it from there.”
Compassionate Certification Centers provides online education, training and resources to health care professionals so they’re better prepared to work with patients who might benefit from cannabis.
“I spent about a year working with ArcView to not only understand the medical side but the industry side as well,” he says. “We found gaps in the system — one of the things that I found in particular was in physician and provider education and background. That’s how our company was formed, to fill the void.”
Doner says the company has two primary goals: To give health care providers and physicians access to the tools and resources needed to effectively integrate cannabis into their practices and to provide a platform for patients to connect with health care providers.
“We want to provide baseline information for patients and clinical providers, as well as patients, so they can understand how this system works and what they can do for patients in order to make it successful,” says Doner, who has been focusing on Pennsylvania’s developing medical program. “We saw some problems in New York, so we’re trying to avoid that.”
Another vehicle for education is the World Medical Cannabis Conference & Expo, an event he organized specifically to build awareness and answer questions about the upcoming medical program.
Never straying too far from his roots in academia, Doner has integrated a continuing medical education (CME) course on medical marijuana into the framework of the April 21-22 event. Participants can earn 22.5 CME credits by completing the course.
Attendance for the course could get a boost from Doner’s litany of other professional obligations. He is the CEO of D&P Medical Group, a minority owner of the Florida-based cannabis nursery San Felasco, the medical director of the Primary Stroke Center, the medical co-director of the Wound & Hyperbaric Center and he moonlights as the attending emergency physician at Armstrong County Memorial Hospital outside of Pittsburgh.
“We’re expecting over a thousand health care providers to come just for the CME portion of this event,” Doner says.
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