Corporate funding of CME programs is down across the board. One simple alternative: offering CME without sponsorship of any kind.
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EG Consulting Group used to make the case to its medical-association clients that it was perfectly accept-
able — legal and permissible — to accept corporate sponsorship for their con- tinuing medical education (CME) pro- grams. Even after the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of Amer- ica (PhRMA) and the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) tightened up their codes of conduct several years ago, strengthening provi- sions dealing with exhibitor gifts and other financial transactions that might unduly influence physician behavior,
“education-oriented sponsorship, as far as we’re concerned at IEG, is one of the biggest safe harbors,” said Dan Kowitz, IEG’s executive vice president. “… The way that we read it, it’s one of the safest things that you can do.” But when it came to CME, many of
IEG’s medical-association clients didn’t want to do it. “We were saying, ‘It isn’t really an infomercial,” Kowitz said.
“‘Give [attendees] the disclaimer. Tell them [that] this session is sponsored by — but [the sponsor] didn’t influence the content.’ They understood what we were saying, but in the end they just didn’t want to go for it.” Associations didn’t go for it because
of something that was coming straight from their CME participants. “There is a consumer feeling, a member feel- ing, across all the medical industries,” Kowitz said, “that if we’re going for certification, we’d really rather not have to worry about sponsor involvement: Am I truly listening to something that’s educating me and preparing me for my career, or am I listening to a pitch on hip replacement?”
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79 PERCENT AND COUNTING That was the attitude that led Orly Light and her physician husband nine years ago to found MCE Conferences, a San Diego–based company offer- ing CME programs for primary-care health-care professionals that, accord- ing to MCE’s website, are “independent of commercial support and unbiased.”
“That is very important,” Light said in an interview, “because the conferences that [my husband] was going to and I was going to with him were getting out of hand with the commercial support. It was obvious that some of the speakers were promoting the products of the companies that were supporting the conference, you know?” And then there were the show floors.
“You couldn’t get into the conferences unless you went by tons and tons of exhibitors that were promoting their products,” Light said. “It didn’t mat- ter whether it was a pharmaceutical company or not. If it was [at] a pediatric conference, then it was toys and chil- dren’s books and whatever else.” PhRMA’s and AdvaMed’s recent revi- sions specifically tightened the screws
on exhibit-hall giveaways, but couldn’t really do anything about the fact that, as IEG discovered, many CME attendees simply don’t like their programs to be sponsored. With that in mind, IEG now advises clients who are CME providers to steer clear of corporate sponsorships
— a philosophy that seems to reflect an industry-wide trend illuminated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s (ACCME) recently published 2011 Annual Report Data: “In 2011, the majority of CME activities (79 percent) did not receive commercial support, accounting for approximately 80 percent of physician participants, and 75 percent of nonphysician par- ticipants. Twenty-one percent of CME activities did receive commercial sup- port, bringing in approximately 20 per- cent of physician participants, and 25 percent of nonphysician participants.” Rather than CME activities, IEG rec-
ommends that its medical-association clients accept corporate sponsorship for other educational programs — such as general sessions and consumer- awareness campaigns. “There are no rules against sponsoring and being